Every time I have to work seriously on Linux I have to re-adjust my environment, which is ok, but some things really get in my way. vim is one of them.

I have never been able to smoothly read text that has embedded bold bits in it, let alone coloured words. My brain stops at each transition and it's as if I have to re-focus. I've had 'more' aliased to 'TERM=dumb more' for years. Vim is a harder nut to crack. I can remove the colours, but I still get bold text according to syntax. This must be set as the file to edit is opened, which is after any .exrcr or .vimrc is done, and I have to use ':set syntax=' to clear it every time I open an edit. The easy way would be install a real, simple, vi if I could. Are there any out there?

I learned vi in '83, and use a commercial 'straight' vi on an almost daily basis, so "get used to it" is not an acceptable answer.

David

You should be able to 'set syntax=' and any other preferences in .vimrc in your home directory.
--- rod.

> You should be able to 'set syntax=' and any other preferences in .vimrc in your home directory.

Tried that and it didn't work. Of course, it doesn't know until it opens the file which syntax it is. I suspect that setting it to blank in .vimrc is just setting it to what it would be anyway at that stage. For 'vi x.pl y.php z.c' to work (and I assume it does) it must be capable of switching syntax on each file open.

David

Just set this in the vimrc:
It will be overridden by other settings, if you have them, so make it the very last line.

I just tested toggling it back in forth in my vimrc here with total success.

I have always found that not having a ~/.vimrc makes it behave a lot more like traditional vi. (See the following section from the help. I get the impression that you can still customize it with ~/.exrc but I have never used that file.

Well with vim on my system I can remove the files in /usr/share/vim/vim72/syntax/ and then no syntax rules will apply to any files.

I have no idea why "set syntax" doesn't work for some people - it didn't work for me either.

However, I found that the fix for me was to add


to the top of /etc/vimrc.

I took that from http://aplawrence.com/Forum/TonyLawrence10.html

Hi.

If vim is run as 'vi', it goes into old-skool plain vi mode. Check 'aliases' to see if there's one set up and unalias it if necessary.

Dave

vim is often aliased to vi. Just remove the alias and you'll get vi (if you type in 'vi' and not 'vim'). It's not vim-in-vi mode BTW.
You can do 'which vi' to find the real one.

Well, it kind of is - vi is usually the vim-minimum version on Linux. But yeah, it's not the same binary.

Dave

Thanks all for your input.

syntax off
in my .exrc did it. On the Ubuntu installation I'm working on 'vi' runs an 'vim' no matter how you start it. There doesn't seem to be a non-vim version of vi installed anywhere.

set t_Co=0
also fixed my colours in a much tidier way than I was using. I'm running it in an xterm from a Mac at home, but the non-colour xterm in OSX still does colours.

The Linux box is not my system, and there are several other users, so I can't do anything that would change what happens for anyone else. I'd rather fix things with changes to my environment anyway. That box is just a VM on something else. It'll probably go away shortly, to be replaced by a possibly different Linux.

Thanks again,
David