Not all vi's are created equal

[Matthew Carpenter]

One thing I've been reminded of in my recent distro-safari is this:
 NOT ALL vi's ARE CREATED EQUAL!

This is indicative of one of vi's strengths, but culminates into a severe 
weakness.  Ordinarily I use pretty much the same home directory I have for 
several years, having much of its origin from COL2.4 and making its way 
through COL eW (pronounced by many "eeeewwwwwww") 3.1, and through several 
releases of SuSE professional.  Each stop along the way has added new 
configs, but many of the originals are still with me.  New installs or 
migrations either get the original /home partition or a rsync copy of it.

Re-enter the distro-wars (sorry, I've been watching my birthday gift too much: 
Star Wars Trilogy with 4 DVD's).  During my excursions into new distros I 
have been slow to introduce configurations from the past.  I want Gentoo, 
Sorcerer's, Ubuntu, and Debian to sink or swim on their own.  Not only do I 
not want the good from eD and SuSE to make it easy for these others to look 
comfortable, but given that I'm testing newer versions of software, I wanted 
to give them a clean slate.  I'm about at the end of my rope.

This is all about to change, at least a little bit.  I've taken to using 
Gentoo on my laptop and trying Ubuntu on my primary Home Media-PC.  Both are 
proving the initial theorem quite painfully.

I would assume that Gentoo leaves the vi configuration as it comes from the 
developers.  Yuck.  I do not like nano or pico or any other small-time 
editors (that's a joke, no flames please)  But I'm thankful to be spoiled by 
SuSE and Caldera.  If I want to stay in EDIT mode and arrow-key around, by 
golly, let me.  If I want to use "d" then <DnArrow> to delete two rows 
quickly, dagnabbit let me!  I'm finding many different ways to insert a blank 
row above the line I'm editing with one letter on it (like "D" or "B" or 
"A").  That is quite frustrating.

On Ubuntu, I selected it for install, but from the command line it thinks I'm 
nuts.  Of *course* there's a command or filename "vi" or "vim";  I just 
installed the dang thing!  But I can't find an executable for the life of me.  

Ok, so this is minor culture shock.  It's normal.  But it sure makes me 
wonder, how much of our editor war was fought on the same battle-ground?  
Since vi behavior is so customizable, just what config were we trashing or 
defending?  I love vi on my SuSE boxen.  But I'm feeling like a 
fish-out-of-water on these other two....

Hope all is well in Linuxland with the rest of you all.