I see vim as a vi-inspired editor with a separate identity, not a vi clone, and as such I prefer vim to try to be a better vim, not a better vi, which doesn’t mean it’s a bad imitation of Emacs. (There are vi clones if you want something truly close to vi.) Filetype plugins are something I specifically like; the only things I dislike with some universality are the autoindent behaviours they specify. But that can be disabled surgically without throwing out the rest.

(I’ve noticed that vim tends to be a point of contention and thus a distinction between the old guard of Unix and its more recent adherents.)

—Aristotle Pagaltzis

When you get sufficiently annoyed about the line ending issue, I think the place to start looking will be set fileformats=unix and that'll solve the problem pretty quickly.

Also it should be possible to insulate the filetype setting from tiny-vim with if has("autocmd") or so, but you probably already know that.

Cheers,

-- John

I should have clarified: I don't mind if vim is superintelligent when invoked as vim. What I mind is getting superintelligence when I type 'vi'. If people are going to install vim as vi, they should make sure that it actually has vi's virtues, including not mangling pasted text and so on.

(I think I said this in an earlier entry, but I should have re-said it in this one too.)

And thanks for the pointer to 'if has("autocmd")', as I didn't already know it. Because I'm not very interested in vim's advanced features, I've basically read the minimal amount of vim documentation possible, so I'm sadly ignorant of these helpful bits.

Speaking as one who likes vim's "fancy" features, I haven't tried it, but have you tried vim -C?

-C Compatible. Set the ’compatible’ option. This will make Vim behave mostly like Vi, even though a .vimrc file exists.

cheers,

Adrian

I've found that true vi (and really good immitations) are now too uncomfortable for me; I really do want multi-level undo and so on.