Or further, I don't know about other distros, but Arch doesn't even package vi (in the main repos) - it's a package group (or some implementation I'm not sure off the top of my head) consisting of vim and vi-compat.

Most systems meaning Linux and macOS. FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD use nvi, and BusyBox (Alpine Linux core userland) uses tiny vi.c.

Very true! I spent a few months using OpenBSD and nvi as my primary environment, and actually ended up pretty productive with it.

vim is so ubiquitous that most people don't realise vi is symlinked to vim pretty much across the board

Yeah

The exception is when you go do some work at server using a commercial unix and that is not how it's set up (in fact they don't even know about vim)

sigh but ok that story is dated and that behavior was already dated at that time

> but ok that story is dated

I'm struggling to think of the last time I saw a commercial unix -- we still had solaris on some new machines until about 2006 - the last I remember was the x4500 with ZFS.

Our sun sysadmin contractor (whose full time job it was to look after about 10 solaris machines) was a big fan of ksh at the time.

I used a Sun workstation as late as 2008, but by that time it was ancient and kept around only for the expensive engineering software that wouldn’t run anywhere else. Even at the time, using CDE felt like a blast from the past. I didn’t dig too deep because I wasn’t using it for long, but I’m pretty sure the vi was original.

Your date range is correct ;)

But some companies are even slower to migrate

Anyway I don't know how the builtin shell was called, maybe simply sh but it was also a big no no for me

I was honestly embarrassed to admit that I have no idea what I've been using on my Ubuntu server for the last 10 years. The way to find out if I'm using vi or vim is to enter command mode (by pressing “:”) and run “version” I'm using vim ;)