That's like saying DOS is very similar to the linux commandline.
It's not "very similar", because out of the box search in vi is hot garbage. It's modal, non-incremental (excremental, as Raskin would have it), has very weak feedback and is all engineered around some bogus concept of manually applied line breaks and thus doesn't work properly for the simplest things. For example how do you search for "very similar" in a text file? Well, you basically don't. Instead you search for "very similar"-I-hope-there-is-no-random-non-logical-line-break-between-these-words.
Several decades in, from vim 6 onwards, you can, for a lot of extra mental overhead in terms of config (incsearch, plus more settings to make it less bad), know-how and obscure vim-specific regexp tricks (like \_) sort-of-do it in a really awkward fashion that few would bother with in practice.
By contrast, from what I can tell, the newlines in canon-cat can actually mean something (because it doesn't have the very unix idea of forcing people to manually sprinkle hard line-breaks all over files in order to be usable with the standard tooling) and you can simply search for them by just pressing return whilst depressing leap.
Emacs comes much closer to leap out-of-the-box, but it's still way clunkier.
The one thing that vi(m) out-of-the-box does better than emacs out-of-the-box is integration with actions, but that requires yet more obscure knowledge to work reasonably well (e.g. Ctrl-T, which is poorly supported in many vim emulations).
Well, you seem to know vim a lot better than myself - I only use about 1% of its features to edit config files, and it works well for me, for this purpose.
I agree that vim is one of the best editors available and use both vim and vim keybindings in other editors/IDEs. But that doesn't mean that Canon-cat didn't have some very interesting ideas not present in vim (or pretty much anything else, sadly).
Ah, now I understand - I was only referring to the single feature of positioning the cursor forward/backward to a given sequence of characters, nothing else.
