vi is an open source editor created in 1976 by Bill Joy.
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vi is a screen-oriented text editor originally created for the Unix operating system. The portable subset of the behavior of vi and programs based on it, and the ex editor language supported within these programs, is described by (and thus standardized by) the Single Unix Specification and POSIX.The original code for vi was written by Bill Joy in 1976, as the visual mode for a line editor called ex that Joy had written with Chuck Haley. Bill Joy's ex 1.1 was released as part of the first Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix release in March 1978. Read more on Wikipedia...
The following tab indented lines will cause a true vi with modelines
activated to infinitely loop putting "Hello World" in the buffer. Hit
to abort the loop and see the output. None of the vi clones
support modelines this powerful, and modelines are disabled by default.
Set the environment variable EXINIT to "set ml" to activate modelines.
vi: $ y a :
vi: $-1y b :
vi: @b :
put a |@b
Hello World
Whitespace is largely insignificant, but these must be the last five
lines in the file to work properly. Unless it is in "vi: ... :" or
"ex: ... :" format, any preceding text will be ignored.