One of the problems I have when talking about 'vim' is that in practice, there are several versions of 'vim'. I don't mean 'version' in the sense of release numbers (although Vim has lots of releases and things change in them over time), but more in how people approach and use Vim. Even more than GNU Emacs, I feel that Vim has turned into an editor that has multiple faces, so the 'vim' that you use may not be the 'vim' that I use.

(Which version or face of Vim you see depends in part on what your system decided to set as Vim defaults, unless you're advanced enough in Vim things to have a personal configuration that overrides them all.)

I've seen people talk about at least three broad versions of Vim:

• The Vim with a bunch of plugins that is a full blown code editor or even IDE environment with LSP support ( eg , also ) and everything else you'd expect from such a thing. My impression is that this is surprisingly popular version of Vim, and I can see why; if you like the Vim editing style and find that LSP stuff fits into it for you, why not?

• The Vim with syntax highlighting, smart indentation (including language dependent things), and other features that you'd expect of a competent programming editor (one without IDE style integration and features).

• The Vim that's only slightly different from true original Vi, 'merely' fixing the things that make Vi a product of its time , such as only having a single level of undo . This is the Vim that I use.

  (People disagree about what in the original Vi needs fixing, and also how, cf undo .)

The Vim I use doesn't have syntax highlighting or smart indentation and I wouldn't use it if it did (or at least if those were on by default). But the Vim that other people experience does sometimes have those things, not necessarily by their decision but because that's how Vim comes set up on that system. Someday, someone may ship a system where Vim is pre-configured to provide the full IDE experience with LSP support already added and so on.

One of the issues with this is that because Vim can be configured to be quite different things, it's not necessarily obvious to people (me included, cf , also ) how to change the Vim they get by default on a system to a Vim they want. People new to Vim may not even know it's possible, and people who know it's vaguely possible may conclude that it's too much work and they might as well switch editors, either to another version of Vi or to an entirely different editor.