How different is Elvis from Vim?
Elvis and Vim are both highly capable vi clones, so your finger memory will serve you well when switching between them.
They share many vi extensions:
Syntax highlighting
Multiple undo and redo
Visual mode, via v and V
Command history and completion
Tag stacks (e.g.
:tags,:tn, etc.)Multiwindow editing, via
:split, Ctrl-W, etc.Extended regexes: alternation, subexpression grouping, etc.
GUI version, in addition to the traditional full-screen terminal UI
Remote file editing: read/write via FTP, and read-only via HTTP
Removal of most classic
vilimits, such as on line lengths and file sizesImproved programming support:
:make, auto-jump to compiler errors, etc.
As impressive as Elvis is compared to stock Unix vi, Vim is even more capable:
Vimscript is much more powerful than Elvis'
ex-derived scripting language.(Elvis and Vim extended the
exlanguage in incompatible directions. This means you cannot easily port yourelvis.inifile to~/.vimrcunless it's just a list of simpleexcommands.)In addition to Vimscript, Vim can be scripted via Lua, Perl, Python, Racket, Ruby, and Tcl.
(Your local Vim probably doesn't have all of these enabled, however.)
The Vim script archive contains thousands of Vim scripts, adding highly useful features, helper applications, games, and more.
Elvis ships with just a few dozen scripts. There don't seem to be any archives of third-party Elvis scripts. (I tried Googling and only found scripts for Elvis Presley movies. Sigh.)
Vim 7.4 ships with syntax highlighting support for about 10× as many file formats and programming languages as Elvis 2.2 does.
Their syntax definition file formats are incompatible, so you can't easily port between them.
Vim 7.4 ships with 18 standard color schemes. If that's not enough choices for you, the Vim Color Sampler Pack is a curated collection of 177 top schemes, as of this writing. There are many more out there besides.
Elvis 2.2 only ships with three color schemes, and that only if you count the GUI and TUI schemes separately. The Elvis themes archive holds another dozen color schemes, total.
Vim has a built-in diff facility with many improvements over command line
diff(1)such as syntax coloring and merging.In addition to FTP and HTTP, Vim can also edit remote files via SCP, SFTP, WebDAV, RCP, and RSYNC.
The best reason to use Elvis over Vim today is that it's a lot smaller. The Elvis 2.2 footprint is about ⅕ that of Vim 7.4 on my system. This makes it a good choice for resource-constrained embedded systems, for example.
Elvis is a perfectly capable editor, within its limitations. But, while Elvis has been sitting stagnant for nearly a decade, Vim has continued to improve.
As a VI clone, understandably, there don't appear to be many functional differences between elvis and vim. According to Learning the vi Editor, 6th Edition, the only difference in is that elvis doesn't have incremental searching.
There's unlikely to be much of a learning curve moving from elvis to vim - they are after all both based on vi and at the very least share the same basic commands such as navigation, modes, search.
Most likely if you were to install vim and treat it as your primary editor for a day - you'd already know which features (if any) elvis offers that you'd miss, and any inconveniences vim might give you (if any).
I'm not that familiar with elvis, but some of the advantages of vim are the abundance of plugins, and that it's maintained. The latest version of vim (7.3) was released in 2010, the latest version of elvis (2.2.0) was released in 2003.
Note: as commented by alexios - changing distro doesn't mean you can't simply continue to use elvis.
As a longstanding elvis user (since probably 1991), there is one elvis feature I'm missing with vim, the display modes.
It is very convenient with elvis to "wysiwyg" edit html and troff manual pages, and the split screen hex mode is also very useful.
Unfortunately, elvis is abandonware since 2004 and misses UTF-8 support which makes me most of the time using vim instead of it.