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I have two installations of vim: 7.4 in cygwin and 7.2 in a Linux virtual machine. The vim in the virtual machine can undo multiple edits by repeatedly pressing the u key. The vim in cygwin can only undo the most recent change. Pressing it a second time is a "redo" (which in the virtual machine can be accomplished with the Ctrl-r sequence).

I would like to get the cygwin installation to be able to undo multiple edits through repeatedly pressing the u key, like it does in the virtual machine.

I have tried comparing the features included in both installations, but I have not identified what could be causing this difference in behavior. Another post on this website suggested I could use the . key after using the u to undo multiple times, but that has not worked for me in the cygwin installation. I also haven't found any settings in the vimrc files that seem like they would modify this behavior.

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  • Using . for multiple undos doesn't work in Vim. That's a feature specific to nvi, which is an entirely different (re-)implementation of vi.
    – Rich
    Commented Mar 3, 2015 at 15:04

1 Answer 1

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Try to :set nocompatible and see if that does it. vi had only one undo level so Vim's ability to behave differently is one of the non-compatible changes the nocompatible setting implements.

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    Simply creating a ~/.vimrc file will also enable 'nocompatible' mode.
    – jamessan
    Commented Mar 2, 2015 at 17:51
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    Relevant documentation: :help cpo-u and :help undo-two-ways
    – user1170
    Commented Mar 2, 2015 at 20:57
  • Thanks Quincy and jamessan. Just creating the ~/.vimrc file worked!
    – Rusty Lemur
    Commented Mar 3, 2015 at 18:59

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