I thought that this would be the case and initially stuck mostly with defaults, but it didn't really turn out to be true. You won't forget how to use vanilla vi

I thought that this would be the case and initially stuck mostly with defaults, but it didn't really turn out to be true. You won't forget how to use vanilla vim unless you really go crazy and replace all keystrokes. I’ve found this to be true. I’m getting a little annoyed with the narrative that it’s best not to customize Vim much because you won’t have those customizations on the generic boxes you’re working on. You don’t forget vanilla Vim; to me, that’s kind of the point. You’d be surprised how much of generic Vim becomes muscle memory and you do things you haven’t thought about in a while. When you become a proficient Vim user, it kinda just happens. However, I hardly ever read anything advocating for a different approach: using Vim’s netrw support for ssh, scp and several other protocols from your main machine, allowing you to use your fully configured Vim to edit files on those machines you’re performing sysadmin tasks on. Once you’ve configured things, you can just vim scp://[user@]machine/path Obviously this won’t always be an option, but when you can, why not? Netrw is a plugin that comes with Vim, so even Vim minimalists can use it even if they have zero 3rd-party plugins installed. It’s even in Vim’s docs: http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pi_netrw.html#netrw-ssh-hack http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pi_netrw.html#netrw-ss... http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pi_netrw.html#netrw-transparent http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/pi_netrw.html#netrw-tr...