I've used nvi for over 15 years. Also use a small vim install here and there. Also have done several talks on grokking ex mode and regex at local vim user group

I've used nvi for over 15 years. Also use a small vim install here and there. Also have done several talks on grokking ex mode and regex at local vim user groups. In my early days when first learning the system I used ee, a HP public domain pico clone which is distributed on *BSD systems for new users. The original Berkeley UNIX had a modded vi named edit which was aliased to ee and while normal vi operation was aliased to e. I'm assuming ee stood for easyeditor back then. The video you linked states in its about section that nvi is not customizable. This is simply not true. It's just as easy to script as ed and ex. Though Bostic never included lisp support like the Joy's editor for extending vi with the shell has always been the main UNIX way of doing it. The classic tutorial to show someone how to extend nvi is to have them do external spell checking with one of the many spell programs.