For years, I could never understand what was special about vi, in that it was short for "visual". What was particularly visual about it? I also couldn't grasp t

For years, I could never understand what was special about vi, in that it was short for "visual". What was particularly visual about it? I also couldn't grasp the idea of "line editors" like ex and ed that came before it... How would that even work? Why one line at a time? Memory? Then one day I saw the famous picture of Gates and Allen at a teletype terminal for the 100th time, and it suddenly hit me. Oh! It was all printed out!! So as you were writing your program, it was being typed out on paper in front of you. Then you'd read the paper (maybe after a few lines) if you saw some errors, then you would use ed or ex to edit the program by entering the line number the replacement text. You'd do that a few times, then run the program again, or print it all out again to double your fixes. Ex would make that a lot easier than ed by allowing regular expressions, etc. So vi is a visual on-screen version for a monitor terminal. Duh! Took me years and years to grok this simple concept.