Solved Anyway to remove vi?

[zirias@]

Could you provide reasoning supporting your conclusion?

Mostly what cy@ said? Even assuming (as I said) there are more vi-users among FreeBSD users, nobody will have a hard time figuring out ee(1). And a base editor that's mostly needed "in case of emergency" doesn't need to be efficient for anyone.

But you might also have noticed that I don't see any need to remove anything here at all.

 

[mer]

I don’t really like Microsoft’s Notepad for example but I appreciate the fact that I can use it without enrolling on a Notepad Course

If one has used MS systems for say 80% of their work, sure Notepad is intuitive. But for those that have grown up on *nix systems (including real versions of Unix), Notepad isn't so intuitive. Editors are about fingers on keyboard and typing. Having to grab a mouse and navigate to a menu because you don't know the key combination to globally search and replace (which brings up yet another gui that you need the mouse for) really hurts productivity.

But again, it's all "horses for courses" or "sixes and threes". Heck I personally find ee and nano a pain to use simply because they are different from my norm.

 

[drhowarddrfine]

If one is struggling with vi, how does one manage to use
a Unix style computer at all?

vi is not archaic. It's fundamental to help at a base level. It's job is not to be a Word replacement

 

[kpedersen]

Once we have PkgBase, you will be empowered to make a mess of your system by removing base packages.

But until then, you will have to settle for:

# rm /usr/bin/vi

You might want to remove /usr/bin/{ex,view,edit} too. Though at that point, you probably don't need curses, so you can likely delete /usr/lib/libcurses* too.

Personally though, I wouldn't. The following in .profile is a little more sane.

alias vi=vim
export EDITOR=vim
export VISUAL=vim

 

[ProphetOfDoom]

I seem to manage to use my FreeBSD/Linux systems okay actually. (Although I’m not anything like as knowledgeable as a lot of people here). The struggle with vi and emacs is frustration. I’m not incapable, I’m unwilling. Like, why would I learn all this arbitrary keybinding/mode stuff when I can just use ee or geany that are self explanatory? I once used Emacs for about a year because I couldn’t find any other decent/free Haskell IDE. I found it really hard going.
I tend to believe good ideas float to the top and that’s why things like Kate/gedit/geany/Notepad have floated to the top.
Mer, thanks for the gracious response to my opinionated post. And yes, it is partly to do with what you’re familiar with. That’s probably why Windows 8 gave everyone the horrors. I remember my late Father used to seriously annoy PC shops by demanding MSDOS to be installed on his new computers, I don’t think he realised that they were probably under pressure to ship them with Windows 98.

 

[jronald]

[FONT=monospace]jronald[/FONT] Why do you think there is a need to remove vi after installing vim?

Because vim has all the functions that vi has.
As someone says, in rare cases only vi works, it's ok to keep both.

 

[cy@]

cy@ I don't think you can compare the typical FreeBSD user to a Linux user ... yet. You could discuss whether we really need two different screen editors in base of course. And if you conclude that one is enough, I agree it would have to be ee(1). But I'm pretty sure there are a lot of "vi-users" around here. And as the base vi really isn't large either, no need to do anything, IMO

Sure, many FreeBSD users tend to be more like tinkerers, even propeller heads. FreeBSD users use FreeBSD by choice. My Linux users use Linux because their employers have made the decision. I think that's the main difference between the average Linux and FreeBSD user.

 

[SirDice]

The following in .profile is a little more sane.

Slight variation on that theme, it first checks if vim(1) is installed or not.

EDITOR=vi
if [ -x /usr/local/bin/vim ]; then
  alias vi=vim
  EDITOR=vim
fi
export EDITOR

Or for .cshrc:

       if ( -x /usr/local/bin/vim ) then
                alias vi vim
                setenv EDITOR vim
        endif

 

[jbo@]

As someone says, in rare cases only vi works, it's ok to keep both.

I wouldn't necessarily call them "rare".
One of examples not related to surrounding tooling: vim over a serial connection is really painful. vi performs much better there.