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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

Except when it's vi and casual vim users can't figure out why nothing works

Aren't casual vim users really vi users? I use emacs primarily but years ago created an extremely minimal (~20 lines) .vimrc to be installed by default on every server I work on. Some color, maybe indentation, I don't even know because I usually just use Emacs/TRAMP these days, but I'm nearly 100% sure that every config there works in vi. I would consider myself a casual vim/vi user in that I don't know the differences.

I may be misremembering, but the biggest differences I remember between vi and vim as a semi-casual user is vi defaults to not supporting arrow keys, and doesn't tell you the mode it's in.

I can't remember the last time I used vi and was unable to use arrow keys. That includes typical Linux installations (Vim, Busybox), Solaris (default is Vim, oddly, but I just confirmed arrow keys work in /usr/xpg4/bin/vi), and various BSDs (nvi).

I'm not a power vi user, though. I usually use JOE (thanks/blame to '90s Slackware education), but occasionally vi is more convenient. It wouldn't be nearly as convenient without the arrow keys as I never learned proper typing technique.

Raspbian, for example included vim-tiny

Just tested FreeBSD vi and BusyBox vi - arrows work in both, but I rarely use them (only in insert mode), so can may not notice if they are not supported somewhere. The biggest difference for me is lack of visual mode in vi.

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