Postby aldimond » Thu Mar 27, 2008 10:01 am UTC
The default install of FreeBSD has nvi (a vi clone) and not vim; vi is symlinked to nvi and remains so after vim installation. At least that's how it was last time I had a working FreeBSD machine.
Fair enough to me. nvi is what you want sometimes. Like when your IDE controllers go berserk and change how they refer to your disks (possibly because you dropped the laptop so many times that the not-designed-to-be-removable CD drive fell out), so your /usr partition is unavailable and you just need to make some quick changes to your /etc/fstab to get yourself back working again. Typing vi Just Worked (because nvi was in /bin and probably statically linked)
If this happened on my Linux box, where vi is linked to vim, in all its dynamically linked glory, I would have been down to ed. Actually the changes I had to make in that case could have been easily accomplished with a sed one-liner, but it's nice to have visual verification that you're doing it right sometimes.
EDIT: correction. My Linux box is (sadly) running Gentoo, which has nano in /bin, and ldd output indicates it should be able to run without anything from /usr. I am better at ed than nano, though.
One of these days my desk is going to collapse in the middle and all its weight will come down on my knee and tear my new fake ACL. It could be tomorrow. This is my concern.