If you ever happen to bork your kernel badly enough to prevent it from booting, you'll find a classic VI pretty quickly, and probably be grateful for it.
Well, not really. My system doesn't have vi installed. Vim, of course, any
time of the day. Stripped Vim (vim-tiny, as Debian calls it), sure, just after
installation. But vi -- no, I don't have it installed.
For quite a long time Linux didn't have vi even ported. There were several
clones, like Elvis and nvi (and Vim, of course). Few years ago I learned that
somebody took the effort and actually ported traditional vi to Linux. I doubt
mainstream distributions cared to include it, though. Why should they? They
already have plethora of clones packaged, and those clones typically do much
more than traditional vi.
The lesson from this tale is this: don't call vi what is merely a vi clone. vi
is a name of a quite concrete project.
And as for kernel unable to boot: if it can't boot, then how the heck am
I supposed to run anything under this kernel? Unless you meant kernel can't
run OS from local disk. I know Linux well enough to manage to run my things.
You would be surprised how much could you hack through if you knew how ELF
binaries work.
You are being needlessly pedantic. The point is that typing "vi" into a terminal runs some application that implements a "vi-ish" interface. Whether it is ported vi or vim or vim-tiny has some effect on how nice that interface is to work with, but I would argue that most vim users would be able to get their configuration fixed or whatever
I assure you I am not pedantic needlessly. The claim was "vi has some issues
with arrow keys". Now tell me: which vi clone was elsurudo talking about?
Because those are different projects. And Vim doesn't have a smallest issue
with arrow keys (unless with "compatible" option set, I think, but I didn't
use it for years and I may remember wrong).
