AIX

vim (an excellent vi clone) creates a swap file when you open a file. A side-effect is that if someone else opens the file in vim it sees that there already is a swap file. It then tells the user that the file is already opened by someone else (and which user that is) and asks if you maybe want to open it read-only. Maybe switching to vim is an option?

Without revision control, vim is probably okay, but note that you can still forcefully edit the file despite its warning (probably opened by another party). And, what if the other party is opening the file with emacs? joe? or just simply the filesystem is samba mounted and the file opened with Notepad on a Windows machine? The swap file serves no purpose then. Can you control the exact editor the staff is using? It depends on whether the company is willing to bear this risk. For most companies, especially for production servers, this is most probably no.

Therefore, any editor-specific feature is unlikely to be safe by most corporate standards, if there is any.

"At the office"..."We are 4-6 workers"...
talk to each other!

Hmm. Then the office will be very noisy, I guess.

I do have a very simple way of doing this but it involves renaming vi to something else (viedit for example) and replacing vi with a K shell script. If you are interested let me know here and I will post the script.

I'm interested : )

OK

If you follow the previous instructions and paste the following into a script named vi and situate it in the /usr/bin directory. I have tested it with no errors.

#!/bin/ksh
#
vimod=/usr/bin/viedit
#
# The above is the renamed vi executable.
#
vercnt=/tmp/vercnt
vercnt1=/tmp/vercnt1
#
# You can put the above anywhere you want.
#
PID=$$
#
# Check the number of attribs equal to zero no file name given.
#
if [[ $# -eq 0 ]]
then
echo No file name given exiting
exit 3
fi
#
vifile=$1
grep $vifile $vercnt 1>/dev/null 2>&1
if [[ $? != 0 ]]
then
echo $vifile":$PID" >> $vercnt
else
echo Sorry this file is already being edited please try later
exit 3
fi
#
# This is where vi will be called.
#
$vimod $vifile
#
# When the vi session ends the function will return here and delete the PID entry from the
# holding file.
#
cat $vercnt | grep -v $PID > $vercnt1
mv $vercnt1 $vercnt

Enjoy.