On Wed, 17 Feb 2021 20:53:14 +0000
The Natural Philosopher  wrote:

> vi was a superstructure pasted on ed as far as I can recall

 Correct - it stands for Visual Interface.

> It was never designed as a CRT based editor. It is 100% line oriented

 Vi was most certainly designed as a CRT based interface to an
editor, one of the very first such. Some of the screen handling code in the
original vi wound up as part of curses.

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