Tutorial: How to use Vim instead of Vi with an alias

Last Update: Mar 25, 2023

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Vim is a lot better than Vi, especially if you’re programming. If you would rather use Vim than Vi, and you’re on an older distro, here is how you set it up in your shell.

Edit your .bashrc file:

vi /root/.bashrc

Add a line to it:

alias vi='vim'

And save the file. That’s it! Most newer distros do this automatically but some distros still use vi by default.

Published: Aug 18, 2011 by Jeremy Morgan. Contact me before republishing this content.