Vi vs Vim – Reasons to Use Vi Over Vim

In insert mode, the cursor is between characters, or before the first or after the last character. In normal mode, the cursor is over a character (newlines are not characters for this purpose). This is somewhat unusual: most editors always put the cursor between characters, and have most commands act on the character after (not, strictly speaking, under) the cursor. This is perhaps partly due to the fact that before GUIs, text terminals always showed the cursor on a character (underline or block, perhaps blinking). This abstraction fails in insert mode because that requires one more position (posts vs fences).

Switching between modes has to move the cursor by a half-character, so to speak. The i command moves left, to put the cursor before the character it was over. The a command moves right. Going out of insert mode (by pressing Esc) moves the cursor left if possible (if it's at the beginning of the line, it's moved right instead).

I suppose the Esc behavior sort of makes sense. Often, you're typing at the end of the line, and there Esc can only go left. So the general behavior is the most common behavior.

Think of the character under the cursor as the last interesting character, and of the insert command as a. You can repeat a Esc without moving the cursor, except that you'll be bumped one position right if you start at the beginning of a non-empty line.

That's a bit like asking what the difference is between a beaten up Datsun 120Y & a Porsche!

Vim has a multitude of features not offered by plain old vi:-

• Multiple windows - horizontal, vertical & tabs.
• Visual highlighting.
• Online help via the :help command.
• Record macros into a register that you can then execute.
• Undo (and redo) multiple times, rather than old vi's insane undo toggle.
• Command line history, search history.
• An entire language embedded along with a host of available functions, eg getcwd()
• Vastly expanded pattern matching.
• Word completion via ctrl-P & ctrl-N.
• A built in file navigator (a little clunky, but can be useful).
• The ESC key actually quits commands you were trying to, well, escape from instead of (insanely) running them as vi does.
• Ability to run commands on all buffers, args or windows via bufdo, argdo & windo.

I could rave on for much longer than this, vim has so many more features than plain old vi that there's really no comparison.

PS - To actually use plain old vi, you'd have to be working on a legacy Unix system, e.g. Solaris (sorry guys, it's going that way). You may well be using vim when you think you're using vi, as most Linux distros simply map vi to vim. If :help works, or multiple undos work, or :version works, you're using vim, not vi!