> >Check out your /tmp directory.
> 
> No, it's in /var/tmp. And recover your file with
> $ vi -r

Thank you both.

There seems to be something strange going on, though.  There are two
recover files in there, but "vi -r" doesn't respond that way:
% ls -l /var/tmp/vi.recover
total 91
-rwx------  1 henchan  wheel  81920 Nov 15 10:49 vi.00118a
-rwx------  1 root     wheel  11264 Dec  6 18:25 vi.00878a
% vi -r
vi: no files to recover.

I tried this both as user "henchan" and as "root" (from the console, not
su).  I even tried changing the owner of the "vi.00118a" file to
"henchan:users," but there was no difference.

Unfortunately removing the files did not speed up loading of docs into vi,
but this information about recover files suggests to me that I should mount
/var/tmp, or even just /var/tmp/vi.recover, on a ram disk (mfs).

henry nelson