Calling it vi is probably used here to mean anything that acts somewhat like the original vi. There are quite a few editors like that, and vim is probably the most common.

> I have never seen a box that used vi in lieu of vim

I'm going to guess that you mostly use Linux boxes? The BSDs use nvi, which works and act like the old Berkeley CSRG vi. If you look at more esoteric systems like Solaris, AIX, etc. , you're likely to find varying versions of vi (disclaimer: I do not know the situation in Solaris or AIX. They are simply examples of esoteric systems—I'd love to be corrected if you do know).

I would not, however, recommend using anything but vim for development. nvi has its place a small text editor to get your config files in place, and vim has its place as a large programmer's text editor.

If you use any Posix environment asside from Linux, you'll find Vi installed by default but not Vim. This includes the BSDs, Solaris, and AIX in my experience. So vanilla Vi still gets use.

I think by now the terms vi and vim are all but interchangeable, except in a context where you specifically mean plain old Bill Joy vi.

On some systems vi is aliased to vim, so you would appear to have both, but you really just have vi. Even on systems where full vim is not installed, the "vi" installed is cut down vim.

I worked in Centos for awhile and vi was aliased to vim, but that might have been a local practice.

It's an interesting point. Mentally, I think of vi as meaning "a member of the set of vien" (from "emacsen").

Also, I never type that extra "m" so why should I say it?

A couple boxes I SSH'd into today only had vi. vim is not always included in the standard $OS install.

vi is still around, but it lacks the plugin architecture of vim. So it's highly doubtful that anyone would find it usable for writing code anyway.