Install vis with Homebrew, apk, apt, dnf, MacPorts, Nix, pacman, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• vis
• vis-clipboard
• vis-complete
• vis-digraph
• vis-menu
• vis-open

Project history

The public GitHub repository was created in November 2014, and the project has remained under the stewardship of Marc Andre Tanner's martanne namespace while also advertising development discussion on SourceHut and IRC. Its development history is unusually explicit about editor-design boundaries: the README says vis is not intended to be bug-for-bug compatible with vi or Vim, and its non-goals reject VimL, GUI front ends, built-in archive/network support, spell checking, and advanced window management.

The project moved through a long pre-1.0 release line rather than a compatibility-breaking stable major. GitHub releases show v0.3 in March 2017, v0.5 in March 2018, v0.7 in December 2020, v0.8 in November 2022, and v0.9 in May 2024. The v0.9 changelog describes years of accumulated fixes and extension work, especially Lua API changes intended to make vis easier to extend.

Adoption history

vis occupies a niche among terminal editor users who like vi's modal vocabulary but want sam-style structural editing and a smaller codebase than Vim. The upstream wiki links distribution packages, and the project is packaged across common Unix-like systems, reflecting adoption primarily through source builds and operating-system package collections rather than a single vendor distribution.

The adoption story is less about replacing Vim in the mainstream and more about keeping Plan 9 editing ideas alive in package-manager culture. The README points users to differences from sam and vi/Vim, making the tool understandable as a deliberate bridge between older research-editor ideas and daily Unix editing.

How it is used

vis is normally launched as a terminal editor for local files. Users get vi-like normal, insert, and visual workflows, then use structural regular-expression commands for selections and transformations that can span arbitrary text structure rather than only line-oriented ranges.

The project also exposes small companion utilities such as vis-open, vis-menu, vis-complete, vis-clipboard, and vis-digraph, keeping the editor core narrow while delegating picker, completion, clipboard, and digraph work to separate commands.

Why package nerds care

For package nerds, vis is the rare editor package whose identity is a design argument: small C core, POSIX-flavored build, Lua scripting instead of VimL, and structural regular expressions as a first-class interaction model. It is often evaluated by people who want a hackable editor without the size and historical compatibility load of Vim.

Its release cadence also makes it a familiar kind of ports-tree package: slow-moving, conservative, and useful to users who knowingly opt into a pre-1.0 but long-lived tool.

Timeline

• 2014: Public GitHub repository for martanne/vis created.
• 2017: v0.3 and v0.4 released as the editor matured publicly.
• 2018: v0.5 released; vis had become a recognizable Plan 9-inspired vi-like editor in Unix package sets.
• 2020: v0.6 and v0.7 released, including Lua 5.4 support and core text-management work.
• 2022: v0.8 released as a stable snapshot after a long development interval.
• 2024: v0.9 released with many bug fixes and Lua API extension improvements.

Related projects

• vis is explicitly related to vi, Vim, and Plan 9 sam. Its README also names LPeg and Lua as important pieces of the extension and syntax-highlighting story.

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/martanne/vis
• https://api.github.com/repos/martanne/vis/releases?per_page=20
• https://github.com/martanne/vis
• https://martanne.github.io/vis/man/vis.1.html
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/martanne/vis/master/CHANGELOG.md
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/martanne/vis/master/README.md