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Lion came with a sad surprise to me. Now, every time I want to run VI on terminal, I get VIM. I hate VIM. How do I get my old and bad VI back to the system? thanks.

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It seems to be vim on SnowLeopard, too: $ which vi /usr/bin/vi $ ls -l /usr/bin/vi lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 3 Nov 19 2009 /usr/bin/vi -> vim – bneely Aug 15 '11 at 5:56
but the app appears different when I run. – Desperate Developer Aug 15 '11 at 6:04
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"appears different" - can you clarify? – bneely Aug 15 '11 at 6:05
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Haha, "...old and bad VI...", it's great to see a poster admit that :-) – Rabarberski Aug 15 '11 at 7:31
@Rabarbeski - VI was king when it was created but after years it became bad and ugly. The problem is that we used to work with that and any change make you lost time specially when you don't have any to spare... VI is so bad that I even think it is good... :D – Desperate Developer Aug 15 '11 at 12:16
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Vi has actually been VIM on most Linux distributions that I have used over the years. In general if you have a ~/.vimrc file that is how you tell vim to act like vim and not vi. Otherwise it should look and act just like vi, this article from 2000 has more details (yup - its been that way for a long, long time).

What specifically are you not liking about Lion's vim behavior? Running vim with the -C flag should force it into full vi compatibility mode even if a .vimrc is present.

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That's it. Creating a .vimrc file solved the problem. Thanks. – Desperate Developer Aug 15 '11 at 7:40
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Am i the only one that is using MacVim?

http://code.google.com/p/macvim/

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I used to use that when I wanted gvim in X11, now I've switched to using Komodo in VI emulation mode when I want the full GUI. Thanks for reminding me though, the project looks to have come along quite a bit. I'll have to try it out again. – cftarnas Aug 15 '11 at 16:58
I use it all day every day. – Warren Pena Dec 1 '11 at 0:47

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