what is the difference between calling vim by typing vi and typing vim

Question

I know this must seem stupid... however I've just wasted like 2 hours trying to get vim-plug working. I am on CentOS7. I type vi and it brings up vim 7.4.160. I typed vim and I get vim: command not found. After faffing about for ages and searching on google as I could not get the plugin manager to work, I finally did yum install vim. And it did. Typing vi and the plugin manager still did now work. Finally now I type vim and the plugin manager works. vi and vim commands with no args brings up the exact same VIM - Vi IMproved banner and exact same versions. At this point I am just curious as to what is going on in the background to cause this behavior.

Answer 1

If you want to run Vim, then type vim. ☺

On a more serious note, most of the Linux distributions provide different builds of Vim, with varying feature levels (i.e., the --with-features=... argument when running ./configure), GUI support, and enabled language bindings. Speaking with my Debian maintainer hat on, I provide these packages:

• vim-tiny: small features, only provides the vi binary, intentionally runs with 'compatible' set, no language bindings, no X/GUI support
• vim: huge features, no language bindings, no X/GUI support
• vim-nox: huge features, all language bindings except Racket, no X/GUI support
• vim-gtk/gtk3/athena: huge features all language bindings except Racket, X/GUI support

In Debian land, you can have more than one of the packages above installed and can use the alternatives system (via the update-alternatives command) to decide which one is used when typing vi, vim, gvim, etc.

It sounds like there's a similar set of packages in CentOS land. I'm not sure if there's something similar to the alternatives system, which would let you configure what vi runs, or if vi is only provided by the vim-minimal package. I think it's the latter since I seem to recall that when you install the package that provides a GUI, you have to run vimx to run that binary in the terminal.

As far as what the actual differences are between the different binaries, you should be able to get a high-level overview from your package manager. You can also ask Vim to tell you. Compare vi --version to vim --version.