I think vi might more charitably be described as a paradigm shift. It also happened to bring terminal independence to everybody by later prompting the development of termcap (like vi, brought to us by Bill Joy). Of course termcap begat terminfo, [n]curses, ...
I feel like grandparent wishing for acknowledgement isn’t really out of line. It’s “Show a little respect; you have no idea where we were before vi.”
Is that not the case? How different is vi to vim?
The differences are not huge, but even if I have a "small" .vimrc with one single plugin, I have issues using the vim.tiny installed on Debian by default.
The Vim help has a list of the differences:
https://vimhelp.org/vim_faq.txt.html#faq-1.4
The most important to me are:
- a real undo - buffers - macros (recorded on the fly with ththe q key) - visual mode (included the block selection mode) - text completion (ctrl-p, ctrl-x-f) - automatic indenting - advanced text objects (selecting everyting between '()')
Not having one single of them would not hinder me much... but all of them at once: that hurts!
A couple of examples. In Spacemacs, the screen regularly goes blank for a while. Or if I have a file open in Spacemacs, close its window, then rename it in the OS, then reopen it in Spacemacs (by double-clicking it in Finder) it reopens it with it's old name. I'm sure there's a way to avoid this, but the fact that it happens in the first place is the issue.
As for the file rename issue, certainly if that's part of your workflow, it's helpful to figure out why it happens. I suspect it's due to the way filesystems work on Linux /Unix.