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After starting to use Ubuntu 16.04, I find that many reasonable vi settings are off (before that I was on Scientific Linux, don't remember which version). This includes things like language highlighting, remembering the cursor's last line, search highlighting, remembering the last search, line number at screen bottom...

I tried to remedy some of these in ~/.vimrc and in /etc/vim/vimrc, which didn't always work.

Before I go on tackling each of the problems individually, I wonder if there is something big that I'm missing which might account for lacking all of these?

Edit: It was suggested that this is a duplicate of this question. Not exactly. It turns out that the answers in that question give a partial answer to this question if they are combined with the answers to a third question. Therefore, I add all this as an answer, since it would be useful to anyone else facing the same problem.

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Helen
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2 Answers2

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Check that you have the full vim package installed, and not just vim-tiny.

vim-tiny is a compact version of vim without many plugins.

Once you install the proper vim package you'll get the usual set of included vim plugins. You may still have to add :set nocompatible to your .vimrc to use its full functionality.

thomasrutter
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Two answers were pointed out in the comments which, when combined, seem to form a kind of answer:

vi now actually invokes vim-tiny (explained here), which has only a few features enabled by default (explained here).

One can change this default by doing 

sudo update-alternatives --config vi

I still don't know if everything could be amended in one single move, though. (Using vim "out of the box" still lacks many of those "standard" features.)

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Helen
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