can act pretty much like a normal editor -- something that the real vi certainly can't do. Long lines are displayed differently. Where vi and stevie wrap the line onto several rows of the screen, elvis displays it on one row and allows you to scroll sideways. In addition, in Elvis almost all ex/vi commands worked (except :@, :abbr, and :preserve in ex mode and @ in visual mode and appending to named buffers). It quickly attracted considerable interest in a number of enthusiast communities. Andrew Tanenbaum quickly asked the community to decide one of these two editors to be the vi clone in Minix; Elvis was chosen, and remains the vi clone for Minix today. In 1989, Lynne Jolitz and William Jolitz began porting BSD Unix to run on 386 class processors, but to create a free distribution they needed to avoid any AT&T-contaminated code, including Joy's vi. To fill the void left by removing vi, their 1992 386BSD distribution adopted Elvis as its vi replacement. But at UC Berkeley, Keith Bostic wanted a “bug for bug compatible” replacement for Joy's vi for BSD 4.4 Lite. Using Kirkendall's Elvis (version 1.8) as a starting point, Bostic created nvi, releasing it in Spring of 1994. In August 1994, Kirkendall announced that he was working on a major rewrite of Elvis, and in October 1996, it was ready for release. The new version had a number of new features, including Multiple edit buffers, so you can edit several files at the same time. Multiple windows, so those edit buffers can share screen space. Multiple display modes, including... "normal" which looks like the traditional vi screen "hex" which is good for viewing binary files "syntax" which supports syntax coloring (configurable) "man" which formats Unix man-pages like nroff "html" which formats Web pages Online hypertextual help A variety of user interfaces, including... "termcap" which uses text screens like the traditional vi "x11" which provides a GUI interface for Unix/X Window users Compiling: elvis can parse error messages, and move to source of error WYSIWYG printing, with drivers for most printer types Built-in calculator with a C-like syntax Extreme customizability "Open" mode, for one-line-at-a-time editing even on very dumb terminals In December 1998, Kirkendall released Elvis 2.1, with added features, including name completion, via the <Tab> key, network protocols (allowing can reading/writing via Web URLs), and a "tex" display mode. Kirkendall maintained the 2.1