Earlier quoted context omitted.
> can’t remember ever meeting anyone who chose vi over vim Pleased to meet you. Most of my console dev time is spent in *BSD, where nvi is where I land. I find the the default creature-features of vim annoying, so I end up having to configure it to be a bit more quiet, and I don't know anything so compelling about it (a vi clone (to an extreme, acknowledged)) that nvi isn't a good enough place to be. I have vim insta…
> I don't know anything so compelling about it For me, it'd be primarily having more than one undo. Not being able to undo the second-to-last change is pretty bad. In fact, vim's undo being set up as a tree that can be walked with g- and g+ is excellent. It's impossible to lose a state of the buffer, even if you undo and make changes. It's a lot more practical to navigate than Emacs' undo, too. EDIT: I just realized…
Do you mean infinite undo? nvi has that. I'm not sure what you mean "set up as a tree" wrt undo, but i'll look into it. I think of nvi's undo as linear - I can 'u' to "undo" and implicitly set my "undo direction" "backward in time" (as one would expect). If I want to "undo, even more", '.' (dot, period) to "do that last command again" is what I'll do. If I want to "undo an undo", 'u'. That has the effect of moving the "undo direction" back towards the state of the buffer we had at the beginning of our discussion here.
...and, now I see your edit ;)
^[u..........:wq