Why does VIM have its own regex syntax?

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Most vi (and therefore vim) features were derived from ed. vi and ed both predate perl by at least a decade or two. A better question might be “why doesn’t Perl use the same regex syntax as vi?”.

Of course, one could also argue that the kinds of regular expressions that one would wish to write inside a text editor to perform common tasks are probably rather different to those you might wish to write inside a programming language.

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