A new installation of Ubuntu exists at work and I’ve discovered that by default, it doesn’t come with real vim. The clue is in the error message:


E319: Sorry, the command is not available in this version: syntax enable

E538: No mouse support: mouse=a


To get things back to normal I needed to install vim and then alias it correctly. Using


which vim


I discovered that /usr/bin/vim was being used – this symlinks to /etc/alternatives/vim and that in turn links back to /usr/bin/vim.tiny. So I installed vim:


sudo apt-get install vim


and then changed the symlink in /etc/alternatives to point to /usr/bin/vim.basic instead – much better :)