Re: Probably a necessity
"Move over to Ubuntu and...wait...vi doesn't behave the same."
I think I can see your problem. You're not really using vi, you're using vim which stands for "vi improved". And all those improvements allow distros to play silly buggers with config. Old vi has been available since V7, which included the code for ed became open source. Old vi is confusingly called new vi, nvi. Use that instead.