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I've noticed something peculiar about the vi and vim packages.
There are two separate binaries; /usr/bin/vi and /usr/bin/vim. Running either in a terminal brings up the same opening screen; both say:
VIM - Vi IMproved
version 7.2.65
and the rest of the typical welcome screen.
The binaries are significantly different sizes:
$ ls -l /usr/bin/vi*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1607824 2008-12-07 23:44 /usr/bin/vi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4868336 2008-12-08 00:09 /usr/bin/vim
vim is a required dependency for gvim, vi is not.
Yet both programs seem to be identical. Perhaps I'm not using features that show the differences, though. Can anyone explain why I would ever use vim instead of vi as installed in the system? (Not a vi vs. gvim question-- I'm talking within CLI only.)
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Vi has only basic features, mainly to be used for system maintenances in a virtual console (outside X).
Vim is almost fully advanced, featuring among others programming interfaces for Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. This is your general console-based workhorse.
GVim adds a GTK-based user interface to this.
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Vim upstream does provide only one kind of sources. The differences are all in the build parameters.
Edit:
If you are interested in some details you might want to have a look at these LFS instructions.
Basic (Vi-like) installation: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/vie … 6/vim.html
Advanced installation: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/vi … s/vim.html
Last edited by bernarcher (2009-04-25 18:56:02)
To know or not to know ...
... the questions remain forever.
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Evil #archlinux@libera.chat channel op and general support dude.
. files on github, Screenshots, Random pics and the rest
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