Recently I saw another discussion of how some people are very attached to the original, classical vi and its behaviors ( cf ). I'm quite sympathetic to this view, since I too am very attached to the idiosyncratic behavior of various programs I've gotten used to (such as xterm's very specific behavior in various areas), but at the same time I had a hot take over on the Fediverse :

Hot take: basic vim (without plugins) is mostly what vi should have been in the first place, and much of the differences between vi and vim are improvements. Multi-level undo and redo in an obvious way? Windows for easier multi-file, cross-file operations? Yes please, sign me up.

Basic vi is a product of its time, namely the early 1980s, and the rather limited Unix machines of the time (yes a VAX 11/780 was limited).

(The touches of vim superintelligence, not so much, and I turn them off.)

For me, vim is a combination of genuine improvements in vi's core editing behavior ( cf ), frustrating (to me) bits of trying too hard to be smart (which I mostly disable when I run across them), and an extension mechanism I ignore but people use to make vim into a superintelligent editor with things like LSP integrations.

Some of the improvements and additions to vi's core editing may be things that Bill Joy either didn't think of or didn't think were important enough. However, I feel strongly that some or even many of omitted features and differences are a product of the limited environments vi had to operate in. The poster child for this is vi's support of only a single level of undo, which drastically constrains the potential memory requirements (and implementation complexity) of undo, especially since a single editing operation in vi can make sweeping changes across a large file (consider a whole-file ':...s/../../' substitution, for example).

(The lack of split windows might be one part memory limitations and one part that splitting an 80 by 24 serial terminal screen is much less useful than splitting, say, an 80 by 50 terminal window.)

Vim isn't the only improved version of vi that has added features like multi-level undo and split windows so you can see multiple files at once (or several parts of the same file); there's also at least nvi. I'm used to vim so I'm biased, but I happen to think that a lot of vim's choices for things like multi-level undo are good ones, ones that will be relatively obvious and natural to new people and avoid various sorts of errors and accidents. But other people like nvi and I'm not going to say they're wrong.

I do feel strongly that giving stock vi to anyone who doesn't specifically ask for it is doing them a disservice, and this includes installing stock vi as 'vi' on new Unix installs. At this point, what new people are introduced to and what is the default on systems should be something better and less limited than stock vi. Time has moved on and Unix systems should move on with it.

(I have similar feelings about the default shell for new accounts for people, as opposed to system accounts. Giving people bare Bourne shell is not doing them any favours and is not likely to make a good first impression. I don't care what you give them but it should at least support cursor editing, file completion, and history, and those should be on by default.)

PS: I have complicated feelings about Unixes that install stock vi as 'vi' and something else under its full name, because on the one hand that sounds okay but on the other hand there is so much stuff out there that says to use 'vi' because that's the one name that's universal. And if you then make 'vi' the name of the default (visual) editor, well, it certainly feels like you're steering new people into it and doing them a disservice.

(I don't expect to change the mind of any Unix that is still shipping stock vi as 'vi'. They've made their cultural decisions a long time ago and they're likely happy with the results.)