I'm roughly at the same level. The main improvement of vim over vi is the infinite undo, and more recently the UTF-8 support. I like the more elaborate status line and the syntax colouring, and I actually have cpoptions set to "downgrade" a few (but not all) features to how they were in vi ( notably vx$ so text you're changing remains visible while you're typing over it, and Esc actually executes the command line).