Offbeat A few hundred lines of Yabasic recreate just enough to keep modal editing muscle memory alive The veteran editor Vi turns 50 this year, and what better way to celebrate than to write a version in BASIC? The code was created by Lee Tusman, who likes to be a little out of step with the latest IT industry fads. Not strictly a professional programmer, Tusman, whose background is in art, began looking at BASIC in 2025. Specifically, Yabasic, an open source BASIC interpreter for Unix and Windows. "For a modern BASIC, it's quite fun to use," Tusman  wrote . "I made my own cyber-hoss racing game, a command line game inspired by the UFO50 and Flash game Quibble Race. I also tinkered with the internals of the text version of The Oregon Trail, and built a clone, a simple version of Dope Wars economic simulation game." All of which brought Tusman to code up a version of the veteran text editor Vi, using BASIC because… well… it was there.…