In my eyes, vi is ok for system administration, but not for programming.

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!