this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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I am surprised that vi is often available, but not vim. It's really annoying on many RHEL based distros, because I am so used to typing vim. Otherwise there is just git I deem essential.
Definitely not limited to RHEL!
Yeah, at least some distros have VIM tiny or whatever it's called so my muscle memory benefits me.
Most distros I mess with have busybox installed, which as vi in it, but yeah sudo apt install vim is one of the first commands I run.
Nowadays vi is just a symlink to vim.tiny, so you're actually running vim (in vi mode).
No. If you have vim installed that's true on many (some?) systems. As I said some distros have vi available, but not vim which is the annoying part.
The original vi has not been maintained for many years. Most distributions, including Debian, Fedora, etc, use a version of Vim which (mostly) is similar to how Vi was.
From Fedoras wiki:
"On Fedora, Vim (specifically the vim-minimal package) is also used to provide /bin/vi. This vi command provides no syntax highlighting for opened files, by default, just like the original vi editor. The vim-minimal package comes pre-installed on Fedora."
From the vim-tiny package description on Debian:
"This package contains a minimal version of Vim compiled with no GUI and a small subset of features. This package's sole purpose is to provide the vi binary for base installations."
R.I.P. Bram Moolenaar. You made me think of it when you said go is unmaintained. I went to vim.org to see who is taking over vim but the security certificate is expired.
It reminded me of this grim realization I had in my grandparents house. They were getting old, I think one or maybe both were in a nursing home by then. The house was falling apart as they were. I was going up the deck stairs and a stair broke under my foot, luckily one of the very low ones. Some dishes had some mold on them in the cabinet. And now going to vim.org, the cert is broken.
You are actually correct. I just checked the manifest of RHEL and it provides vim-minimal and not vi like I assumed.
I noticed that it behaves a bit different than the version available on AIX for example which for sure uses real vi, but I never gave it a second thought. Interesting.
Also OpenBSD use different versions, I'm guessing their vi is the original since it can't handle utf-8. And iirc ex(1) is also a vim variant on Linux. I've never met anyone who actually uses ex though. ed(1) I think is just GNU ed. I am not certain about these versions though.
Solution - learn using vi. You already did most of the work by learmjng vim.
There is not really anything to learn. It is just lacking some useful features and shortcuts which make it slower to use. It's still much better than nothing.
Usually my biggest issue is that I am so used to write
vimovervi. At least for small edits.