The "problem" with vi is that you'll outgrow it very fast. People tend to work around this by installing a dozen of plugins but I think you should use Emacs for that.
I'm quite proficient in both editors and while I resort to Emacs for 95% of my coding (and mail, and notes, and agenda, and...) sometimes nothing beats the simplicity of firing up vi for a quick edit in a remote server.
Using vanilla vi with a minimal to non existent .vimrc can be liberating.
Huh? vi does not have any plugins; only vim. vi is even more bare-bones than vim, lacking a lot of features (macro recording and text objects being the ones I miss). It is extremely common to find vi pre-installed on countless servers, however, making it extremely convenient if you're an expert with it.
What's amusing to me is how many people don't know vi very well and use plugins in vim that vi can handle as well or better through macros, ex scripts or external commands.
This bothers me. People should just call it vim when they mean vim. I suspect most people here haven't actually touched Joy's vi or its closest derivative, nvi.
I don't know where this practice comes from but it feels exactly the same as when people say Unix when they are very obviously talking about GNU/Linux.
It probably comes from the fact that most people alias vi to vim. And from the fact that when you type vi, you're probably not getting vi, but vim in full compatibility mode.
These actions make the two interchangeable in people's minds.
I'm quite proficient in both editors and while I resort to Emacs for 95% of my coding (and mail, and notes, and agenda, and...) sometimes nothing beats the simplicity of firing up vi for a quick edit in a remote server.
Using vanilla vi with a minimal to non existent .vimrc can be liberating.