On my default Ubuntu server installation vi
is very colorful. However, most of colors are so dark that I cannot really see what’s written against dark window background. This is fortunately mitigated by setting background into “dark mode”.
set background=dark
Second issue I faced was inability to copy/paste from other applications without the whole text being indented like crazy. Of course, there is setting for that too.
filetype indent off
With these two settings, my vi
was usable again.