Pretty much likewise. Actually, I do away with the tabstop=4 these days too -- I've grown to like 8-width tabs. When I started using vi on a Sun machine in ~1

Pretty much likewise. Actually, I do away with the tabstop=4 these days too -- I've grown to like 8-width tabs. When I started using vi on a Sun machine in ~1986 or so, I was an expert at 'edlin' (if there could be such a thing) because it existed on every DOS machine. I learned vi for the same reason: It not only ran on everything, it was pretty much guaranteed to be installed on everything. I hated it, as I was used to many other 'visual editors' that were modeless, more like emacs. The first Apollo editor was my favorite. But in those days, installing an editor was a real task, so I went with what was there. Now it's in my fingers. Although on the (fairly frequent, because busybox) occasion I have to use REAL vi, I'm flustered when I type capital-V to get a visual line buffer...