Re: switching to vim-tiny for standard vi?

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org>]

On Sun, Dec 18, 2005 at 02:57:17PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> > I'm one of the people who prefers nvi over vim. I do so quite strongly,
> > because I find that nvi obeys my fingers and vim does not. The
> > differences are minute, of course, but they are really irritating.
> > Unfortunately, I can't enlist them properly, since my fingers don't talk
> > to me: I notice vim's incompatibility from the fact that my fingers have
> > to keep correcting text under vim, but not under nvi. On days when I'm
> > generally annoyed already, if I accidentally use vim instead of nvi, I
> > can get quite lyrical with my cursing.
> 
> Yeah, I understand the feeling (coming at it from the exact opposite
> side). It would be helpful if there were an analysis of the major differences
> somewhere; the ones I am most aware of incude:

":set compatible" will switch Vim's behavior for all of these, except for:

>  - in vim the arrow keys always move around even in insert mode. In nvi
>    they do too (surely it diverges from "real vi" here?), but if you arrow
>    to the end of a line, it flashes the screen and drops you out of insert
>    mode.

In "compatible", arrow keys don't work at all in insert mode, like vi
("set esckeys" to revert).

I'm not sure how to get the "moving cursor past the end of line drops out of
insert mode" behavior.

>  - some commands like 'cw' display differently in vim, although the end
>    result of the keystrokes is the same for all the standard vi commands I
>    use

(don't know)

>  - nvi flashes the screen/bell when a command fails; vim does not

":set visualbell"

-- 
Glenn Maynard