Comments on: Vim

By: Tom Wright

Tom Wright — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:25:24 +0000

Just reinstalling Ubuntu at the moment and vim-tiny certainly is there (thank goodness). Makes sense that KUbuntu of all derivatives would be missing it in any case as (in my experience) KDE users just tend to use Kate anyway.

By: Tom Wright

Tom Wright — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:39:03 +0000

Actually the command vim does not do anything by default, the vi command acts like the old Vi editor though.

By: Tom Wright

Tom Wright — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:35:24 +0000

Yes, I suppose now we have the best of both worlds; we have awesome editors but don’t need them just to get the computer to boot up.

The one thing I worry about now though is whether I might be stranded on shared systems without Vim, a fate not worth thinking about (just having vim-tiny does not bother me too much).

By: dominik

dominik — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:47:49 +0000

>I’m a bit disappointed to hear that vim-tiny is not
>installed by default in Ubuntu.

Uhm, you meant vim(full), right? On my fresh install there was
vim-tiny installed (ubuntu and debian)

By: Dougie

Dougie — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 20:25:04 +0000

I mentioned compatible mode in the second paragraph!

By: Dougie

Dougie — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:20:48 +0000

I thought that was a little odd too, I think we generally tend to view the different flavours as only differing by interface but it seems not to be the case.

Although I’ve used XFCE a lot, Xubuntu is fairly new to me having used Gnome until recently but I have noticed a lot of little differences.

By: Mackenzie

Mackenzie — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:51:26 +0000

Ooooh I didn’t think that’d be something that’d vary by Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu. I’m actually a Kubuntu user. I just assumed all 3 would include the same command line tools but just different graphical ones.

By: dominiko

dominiko — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:42:25 +0000

> I remembered that pressing the cursor keys in
> insert mode inserts characters.

This is because by default, Vim runs in compatible mode
which means that ‘esckeys’ is off, among other things.

Cursor keys can be made to work in insert mode by doing
“:set esckeys”. You can also make them work with
“:set nocompatible” since this involves switching on
‘esckeys’.

You can read about it in “:help ‘esckeys’”.

I’m a bit disappointed to hear that vim-tiny is not
installed by default in Ubuntu. It’s a small package
and Linux is not Linux without Vi.

Anyway, any serious Vim user will install vim-full
or compile the latest Vim from sources since vim packages
are always lagging behind many patches.

By: Dougie

Dougie — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 14:56:23 +0000

Not disputing that they aren’t in Ubuntu, I installed Xubuntu though – where vim-tiny still has a home – it’s listed in Synaptic and this system has a default install.

By: Mackenzie

Mackenzie — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 13:44:22 +0000

My .vimrc includes “set nocompatible” but with vim-tiny it still acts like vi, not vim, so I’m pretty sure vim-tiny just plain doesn’t support using arrow keys.

And again: vi, vim, vim-tiny…NONE of these are included in 9.10.