What Happened to My vi?

If you are using Ubuntu Linux, you might be wondering why vi (er, vim) doesn't save searches and other things into a history file, or why it ignores your syntax colors (which show different colors for different elements of C or bash code, for example).

Yes, you moved your .vim* files from another box. Yes, it's vim version 7.2, not 5.7.

Dang thing don't work.

Then you run

vim --version

and discover that the viminfo (history, etc.) and syntax options are marked with a minus sign! Oh, so you have to recompile your own vi from source code?

Not a bit of it!

Look at your current version of vim using the dpkg-list command:

dpkg --list 'vim*'

un vim 2:7.2.079-1ubu Vi IMproved - enhanced vi editor

ii vim-tiny 2:7.2.079-1ubuntu5 Vi IMproved - enhanced vi editor - compact version

You will see that the standard version is not installed (the n in the second column). The Ubuntu folks decided that you wanted to start out with the "tiny" version (i = installed).

Hah!

Well, not a problem.

Use Synaptic or this shell command to install a bigger vim and its doc files (as root):

apt-get install vim vim-doc

After the package install, you will find in /usr/bin a command named vim.basic, which, as you can well imagine (and see with ls -l), is bigger than vim.tiny. The install also resets the /usr/bin/{vi,vim} symlinks to correct links in /etc/alternatives, so next time you type vi or vim, you get vim.basic and not vim.tiny.

If you want even bigger, then you can install vim-gnome (previously called vim-full) — this gets you a GUI version with a scrollbar, etc.