Not a true war story but I used to use "open mode" in vi a lot when on a 1200 baud modem. It's like a line-based visual mode; if you have a smart but slow termi

Not a true war story but I used to use "open mode" in vi a lot when on a 1200 baud modem. It's like a line-based visual mode; if you have a smart but slow terminal, you can move around in the current line with h and l etc., but when you move up or down a new line is printed and you move within that line now. The i, a and c commands work more or less as normal. A few times I got into open mode in a dumb terminal, which is an even more special experience: vi will print backslashes when you delete characters and you have to count them yourself (I may misremember things slightly here). You enter open mode using the :o(pen) command. Later I discovered that you can use visual mode with a small number of lines (:set lines), which was much more pleasant. Also I got a 14k4 modem which solved most other problems.