vile retains the "finger-feel", if you will, of vi, while adding the multiple buffer and multiple window features of emacs and other editors. It is definitely not a vi clone, in that some substantial stuff is missing, and the screen doesn't look quite the same. The things that you tend to type over and over probably work. Things done less frequently, like configuring a startup file, are somewhat (or very, depending on how ambitious you are) different. But what matters most is that one's "muscle memory" does the right thing to the text in front of you, and that is what vile tries to do for vi users.

Features and improvements over vi Multi-window/multi-buffer editing Multi-level undo/redo Multi-platform with native features rather than in a Unix-compatible environment Reads a buffer from standard input or from piped external commands Error-expression parsing jumps to the line producing compile-errors, grep matches, etc. Dynamic window updates Scripting language Many mode settings, globally, per-buffer, per-window Color-syntax highlighting for each majormode (88 as of version 9.7). Command-completion Selection-highlighting using keyboard or mouse. Complex fence feature enables the user to step through if/then/else statements Extended regular expressions using both POSIX and Perl features.