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In what circumstances would you run `vi` and find yourself upset that you end up in `vim`?
by rgoulter 3y ago
In what circumstances would you run `vi` and find yourself upset that you end up in `vim`?
- tambourine_man 3y agoYou won’t, but vi is scriptable and part of POSIX. It’s a basic infrastructure that you don’t want to break.
- rgoulter 3y agoApparently the original vi isn't POSIX compliant; nor is vim. https://vimhelp.org/vi_diff.txt.html#posix https://vimhelp.org/vi_diff.txt.html#posix I think "if the script worked before, I want it to work later" has much more practical weight. Though, on the other side of practicality, I've heard sed, awk, and perl suggested for manipulating text in bash scripts far more than I've heard of vi recommended for the task.
- ansible 3y agoYes. If you need to do some text manipulation in a shell script, `sed` or something like that is what I'd reach for first. (I haven't used `awk` or Perl for quite a while.) I'd think even `ed` would be a more straightforward choice than `vi`.