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After starting to use Ubuntu 16.04, I find that many reasonable vi settings are off (before that I was on Scientific Linux, don't remember which version). This includes things like language highlighting, remembering the cursor's last line, search highlighting, remembering the last search, line number at screen bottom...

I tried to remedy some of these in ~/.vimrc and in /etc/vim/vimrc, which didn't always work.

Before I go on tackling each of the problems individually, I wonder if there is something big that I'm missing which might account for lacking all of these?

Edit: It was suggested that this is a duplicate of this question. Not exactly. It turns out that the answers in that question give a partial answer to this question if they are combined with the answers to a third question. Therefore, I add all this as an answer, since it would be useful to anyone else facing the same problem.

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Helen
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  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been [moved to chat](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/57155/discussion-on-question-by-helen-vi-settings-look-off-in-16-04). – terdon Apr 15 '17 at 15:27
  • @EricCarvalho: tl;dr The OP cannot know in advance that the linked question (partially) answers this one. Long reply: This has been debated a lot in the removed comments. I very strongly suggest to *not* mark this as a duplicate. The reason is that *a part* of the answer to this question can be found in the linked one, but there are *more parts* in the answer to this question, and if someone asks *this* question then they can't know that the answer hides in the other one which presupposes a different background by the person who asks the question. – Helen Apr 16 '17 at 03:58

2 Answers2

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Check that you have the full vim package installed, and not just vim-tiny.

vim-tiny is a compact version of vim without many plugins.

Once you install the proper vim package you'll get the usual set of included vim plugins. You may still have to add :set nocompatible to your .vimrc to use its full functionality.

thomasrutter
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  • Thanks, this actually should also involve changing the default to `vim` (actually I was going to edit my own answer to include this). However, there are still many features missing, to my dismay. – Helen Apr 11 '17 at 06:31
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    It may be that the vim defaults are just very plain, with much of the good stuff disabled unless you turn it on. Try the vim-sensible project which provides a good set of default settings - some distros and vim clones will use defaults like those (indeed neovim uses the ones from vim-sensible). – thomasrutter Apr 11 '17 at 11:40
  • https://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible – thomasrutter Apr 11 '17 at 11:41
  • I'll check this out! – Helen Apr 12 '17 at 04:05
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Two answers were pointed out in the comments which, when combined, seem to form a kind of answer:

vi now actually invokes vim-tiny (explained here), which has only a few features enabled by default (explained here).

One can change this default by doing 

sudo update-alternatives --config vi

I still don't know if everything could be amended in one single move, though. (Using vim "out of the box" still lacks many of those "standard" features.)

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Helen
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  • Syntax highlighting, search highlighting, etc. have to be enabled, and [remembering the last position as well](http://askubuntu.com/a/224908/158442). It might be your previous distro or system administrator kept default vimrc that enabled lots of stuff (I know I did), but the default configuration is minimal. – muru Apr 11 '17 at 06:23
  • @muru: I see. It's a little weird however that my `/etc/vim/vimrc` came with very few options, so it's not just uncommenting them, I actively have to include them. (E.g. no search highlighting.) – Helen Apr 11 '17 at 06:39
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    @Helen adding detail to this answer explaining how you are actively including these options mentioned in your question, IMHO would have a positive impact on this answer. – Elder Geek Apr 14 '17 at 16:25
  • Agreed, I'll deal with it soon. – Helen Apr 15 '17 at 02:47