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Date: Sat, 3 May 2003 19:26:04 -0700 (PDT)
From: Viktor Lazlo <viktorlazlo@telus.net>
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To: William O'Higgins <william.ohiggins@utoronto.ca>
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cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: vim isn't working as expected
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On Sat, 3 May 2003, William O'Higgins wrote:

> I am a new user of FreeBSD migrating from Red Hat Linux.  There are a
> few differences that I am having trouble with.
>
> vi - my editor of choice, and it doesn't work in the ways I expect it
> to.  I am used to vi being aliased to vim (which I have done in FreeBSD)
> and having syntax highlighting, arrow keys, and a tell-tale line at the
> bottom of the xterm to remind me which mode I'm in, which line and
> position, and how much file I'm looking at.  All these things are gone in
> FreeBSD.  Could someone tell me what I'm missing?  Thanks.

Oops, my bad! I hadn't noticed you said you already had aliased vi to vim
until I had already hit send!

To enable syntax highlighting enter:

:syntax on

at the vim/ex command line.

For a status line enter:

:set showmode

To enable these automatically you need to set up a .vimrc file, examples
can be found in

/usr/local/share/vim

and

/usr/doc/share/examples/vim

Cheers,

Viktor