VI is a Visual EDITOR (hence the name -- vi for VIsual). What is a visual editor (as opposed to a non-visual ONE)? Visual editors are ones that let you see the document that you are editing as you edit it. This seems pretty common in most editors today, so the idea of a non-visual editor is a little STRANGE. Examples of non-visual editors are sed, ex, ED, and edlin (the last one being the editor SHIPPED with DOS until relatively recently.)

VI was written by William Joy as part of the bsd distribution of Unix. It was later used by AT&T, and has been standard Unix since.

VI is a Visual Editor (hence the name -- vi for VIsual). What is a visual editor (as opposed to a non-visual one)? Visual editors are ones that let you see the document that you are editing as you edit it. This seems pretty common in most editors today, so the idea of a non-visual editor is a little strange. Examples of non-visual editors are sed, ex, ed, and edlin (the last one being the editor shipped with DOS until relatively recently.)

VI was written by William Joy as part of the bsd distribution of Unix. It was later used by AT&T, and has been standard Unix since.