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Others => Miscellaneous => Topic started by: pichel on February 27, 2008, 12:32:42 AM

Title: arrow keys and vi
Post by: pichel on February 27, 2008, 12:32:42 AM

Hello,
when using vi, locally or remotely, and depending on the distro or combination of them (debian, ubuntu, mac os X) I occasionnaly find some difficulty with the arrow keys. Let me explain :

• When everything goes well, if I'm in insert mode (esc - i or a), I can type text  and then move to the next line quickly using the arrow keys
• When it goes wrong, using the arrow keys in this mode results in inserting a new line with a command character on it. The only way is to escape to command mode to delete the offending line and beeing able again to use the arrows.

I think of a misconfigured keyboard option somewhere, but where ? And strange enough, it can goes well from the mac with ssh control over a debian for example, where locally I'll have the problem... Where should I search ? I'm quite lost in all vi options and settings to know exactly where to look.

Thank you

Michel

Title: Re: arrow keys and vi
Post by: Ricky on February 28, 2008, 12:37:32 AM

You know, in earlier days keyboard used to have only alphanumeric keys and not those extra arrow keys and numeric keys.So you might be right though I am not facing similar problem here but had faced few times at other machines but apart of  giving some commands on CLI .. I do not bother much as mostly coding etc. is done GUI.
I am not sure if there is any such setting for changing what VI see as keyboard.. but I will look .

Title: Re: arrow keys and vi
Post by: RazaMetaL on March 12, 2008, 04:56:47 AM

Try installing vim :

aptitude install vim