(Not a bird of prey as someone else pointed out - you need a bigger ship to snag a comet ;-) )

Or a Klingon battle cruiser on a mission to bring a comet back into the 24th century :-)

If you search everymac.com you can easily find out which macs can run which versions of MacOS.

... and keep those sheep quiet - no bleating to change any resonant properties of anything during the flyby ;-)

Right - like - call your phone vendor if you experience loss of service... Never figured that one out either... ;-)

I write of the order of tens of thousands of lines of Perl a year. Most of it runs for years without any need for debugging. Easier to write something that works correctly the first time. At least - I find it so. And, yes, I program in quite a number of other mainstream languages too - as well as a number of others that aren't like APL and Prolog. But - this thread was about vi ;-)

Agreed - I teach Perl programming. I *try* not to teach it to people who can't program, but you never know who will turn up in a class...

Not seen much Star Trek I take it ;-)

You're right. It was an octal keypad - not a set of toggle switches. My bad. PDP 11/34.

So, - here's the bottom line. Almost nobody here agrees with the OP premise :-)

First thing I do on almost any Windoze system is to install a full Cygwin setup. Makes it usable ;-)

Besides... ed's luxury... By, - when I were't lad we used to toggle in t'code from t'front panel by 'and in octal. None of this fancy editor nonsense...

Well I was going to talk about ed - acutally I was going to mention ex first and then work back to ed - but I thought folks might not know what they were ;-)

It's a matter of functionality, speed of use and the commonality of embedded operations that work the same as in other UN*X tools. Incredibly powerful. Would pay to have vi on systems that don't have it.

vi or nothing. Not vim, not gvim, nvi or anything else. No A, B, C or D. :-)