Mar 07, 2026, 18:59

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:59:37 +0000
slackware, nvi, vim

Yeah, elvis is basically dead on UTF-8. nvi is the right call, though worth noting it originated from Keith Bostic at Berkeley, OpenBSD just maintains a fork of it. Slackware's package is well maintained, Patrick has been keeping a solid patchset going: 41 patches from Debian covering correctness fixes, LFS, regex, GCC compatibility and so on, plus upstream fixes from Sven Verdoolaege's git tree. I've been maintaining my own local build on top of that with 4 more upstream patches, a buffer overflow fix in ex_comm_search, an invalid access in filename expansion and two memory leak fixes in ex_aci and screen_end.

That said I've been also playing with neatvi lately. It has native UTF-8 support baked in from the ground up, bidirectional text, combining characters, everything. Worth a look if UTF-8 is your main concern.