Different behavior of `vim -R` and `view`

Question

Manual page on vim ($ man vim) states:

  view      Start in read-only mode.  You will be protected from writing the files.  Can also be done with the "-R" argument.

But, they have major differences.

When starting vim as vim -R the syntax coloring works.
But when started as view syntax coloring doesn't work.

view doesn't support vertical splitting, I tried Ctrl+w v, :vs and -O command line option.

Does view have a separate config? Or maybe it is completely separate from vim itself?

Answer 1

For some reason, on that server (not administered by me) view is a symlink to /bin/vi, while vi is aliased to /usr/bin/vim system-wide.

Both binaries, vi and vim, use the name they were launched with (argv[0]) to determine the behavior – whether or not to be in readonly mode. See https://vi.stackexchange.com/a/20355/23667 for details.

To fix my issue, I just added alias view='vim -R' to my personal ~/.bashrc.