If you keep hearing about vi (“vee eye”) from your Linux friends but never had a chance to experience this powerful text editor yourself, here’s something for you.

A web hosting company called “Internet Connection” has written a clone of Vi in Javascript that lets you run Vi inside any web browser. You don’t have to install any software.

This online vi-clone is known as jsvi and it supports almost all the regular vi keys and substitution commands. There’s also an inbuilt spell checker plus you can copy-paste text from the clipboard.

The other standard option is VIM - a desktop based Vi client that’s more advanced than the main Unix version and is available for all platforms.