Ok, it turns out that if the terminal nvi is about to run on is 0 rows, 0 cols, nvi segfaults on startup. I suspect this to be a ncurses bug, I am using: ncurses-base 1.9.8a-5 ncurses-bin 1.9.8a-5 ncurses-term 1.9.8a-(5) ncurses3.0 1.9.8a-5 ncurses3.0-dev 1.9.8a-5 nvi used to work before I upgraded nvi & ncurses. Austin