For me, vim is a combination of genuine improvements in vi’s core editing behavior (cf), frustrating (to me) bits of trying too hard to be smart (which I mostly disable when I run across them), and an extension mechanism I ignore but people use to make vim into a superintelligent editor with things like LSP integrations.
Some of the improvements and additions to vi’s core editing may be things that Bill Joy either didn’t think of or didn’t think were important enough. However, I feel strongly that some or even many of omitted features and differences are a product of the limited environments vi had to operate in. The poster child for this is vi’s support of only a single level of undo, which drastically constrains the potential memory requirements (and implementation complexity) of undo, especially since a single editing operation in vi can make sweeping changes across a large file (consider a whole-file ‘:…s/../../’ substitution, for example).
↫ Chris Siebenmann
I have only very limited needs when it comes to command-line text editors, and as such, I absolutely swear by the simplicity of nano. In other words, I’m probably not the right person to dive into the editor debate that’s been raging for decades, but reading Siebenmann’s points I can’t help but agree. In this day and age, defaulting an editor that has only one level of undo is insanity, and I can’t imagine doing the kind of complex work people who use command-line editors do while being limited to just one window.
As for the debate about operating systems that symlink the vi command to vim or a similar improved variant of vi, I feel like that’s the wrong thing to do. Much like how I absolutely despise how macOS hides its UNIX-y file system structure from the GUI, leading to bizarre ls results in the terminal, I don’t think you should be tricking users. If a user enters vi, it should launch vi, and not something that kind of looks like vi but isn’t. Computers shouldn’t be lying to users.
If they don’t want their users to be using vi, they shouldn’t be installing vi in the first place.
I learned vi in college and used it often in the golden age of UNIX. vi is guaranteed to be on every UNIX system. Yes one level of undo. On a PDP-11 or a 68000 based system you don’t get a lot of RAM so this makes sense. Back in the old days one level of undo was really all you got. I still use vi when emulating PDP-11 on SIMH.
> as such, I absolutely swear by the simplicity of nano
In the same category of simplicity (for when I actually use a terminal editor), my fav is: https://github.com/gphalkes/tilde