vim on other OS's

[Cuvou]

Has anyone tried using vi/vim on a variety of other operating systems? The ones I've tried it on have a weird default configuration that makes them much more difficult to use than Fedora, and I wonder what the root cause of that is.

On Fedora I can open a file with vi, use arrow keys to move around, the "i" key enters insert mode and then I can go ahead and edit the file, escape, ":wq" and I'm done. But on a handful of other operating systems I've tried to use vi on, things never worked quite so well.

The OS's I had vi problems on were: a recent version of Ubuntu (maybe not 10.10 but a version before that), OpenSolaris, Arch Linux, and iirc I had trouble with OS X Leopard as well.

What happens on these OS's is... I open a file with vi, use the arrow keys to get to the line I want, hit "i" for insert mode and.... nothing happens? there's no "status bar" across the bottom of the terminal saying I'm in insert mode. So I try to type things, and the typing is weird (it only wants to write over top of existing text instead of inserting new text), so I use the arrow keys to try to move the cursor and fix it, and the arrow keys just start putting weird garbage characters like ^W or something in there. I never figure out what's wrong at this point or how to fix it, and I end up hitting escape a half dozen times and ":q!" to get out of the file without saving it, and then poke around for a different text editor (usually falling back to nano).

On Ubuntu the vim troubles were fixed by doing a "sudo apt-get install vim-common" or something along those lines. I didn't figure out how to fix vim on OpenSolaris, Arch Linux or OS X however. Arch Linux really caught me off guard though, because the installer asks you what text editor you'd like to use, and I picked vim, only to find out I couldn't edit any of the config files with it, and the setup tool wouldn't let me change my mind. I had to end up going to a terminal and edit the files by hand with nano instead.

Is it documented anywhere why vim acts so weird "by default" (I'm assuming it's by default, and that CentOS/Fedora ship the extra package that makes vim usable but other distros don't)?

[jpollard]

Not weird - usually this is caused by incompatible interfaces with ncurses
libraries and curses libraries (solaris problems).

Some of the incompatibilities are caused by the .configure script - it
attempts to guess what configurations/systems you are on, and if they
aren't recognized will do a fallback to a basic configuration.

The lack of a status bar can be caused by ncurses incompatibilities,
for instance. If I remember right, his requires that the curses/ncurses
libraries support multiple regions - some do not, or only support one.

vim has to make a lot of assumptions about its operating environment
for terminal handling, and some of those are "not quite right" for some
systems. Especially when it comes to the fancier features. I think some
of the fallback assumptions are to drop to a basic vi environment that
does not have a lot of the extensions that vim contains.

[RupertPupkin]

Use emacs.

[forkbomb]

Don't know about the others, but the Arch install disc ships with a stripped down vim build that behaves much more like the vi of older UNIX variants. On most distros these days vi is a symlink to vim. After Arch is installed you can install the vim you're used to (either the vim package or gvim which is a meta-package that includes a command line build of vim). In other words the "weird" vi is only a feature of the Arch install disc.

I'm personally really used to the behavior of "modern" vim, and whenever I'm running an Arch install I always get bit by selecting vi.

[JamesNZ]

Originally Posted by RupertPupkin

Use emacs.

uh-oh, I see a flamewar coming. (I don't like vim either btw)

[ElderSnake]

Sounds exactly like my recent experience with Vi on FreeBSD.

I had a cheatsheat for Vi sitting on my nearby laptop to help me out but it still did weird things, much like you describe. It was easy to make mistakes because typing and deleting letters didn't always work as expected.

Still, I struggled and managed with it until I managed to get a hold of good old nano. Though maybe I'm just really really bad with vi and I have much to learn, eh, I dunno. But Nano does what I need it to anyway.

[forkbomb]

Originally Posted by JamesNZ

uh-oh, I see a flamewar coming. (I don't like vim either btw)

Why does it always seem like it's the emacs users who are picking the fight?

[linwhwylb]

That because the configuration files of vi or vim in other OS don't written properly or the profile you are used to.
In many OS,vi is just vi, in Fedora vi is alias vim, so when you type vi in Fedora you are in vim.We all know that vim is VI Improve and it has many features that vi doesn't.