VIM gone mad?

foxicatko · n00b Joined: 15 Mar 2008 Posts: 14

Hello.
I've been using VIM for about two years with absolutely no problems. Suddenly, about a week ago, arrow keys started to skip words instead of moving one character left/right. This word skipping is not exactly like ctrl+arrow, because it moves the cursor to the first letter of a word, then another press moves the cursor one char past the last char of that word, then to the first char of the next word and so on.

It's driving me nuts since I'm not used to hjkl and it makes editing a nightmare.

I can't recall doing anything that might have any impact on VIM's behavior - no messing up with settings, no emerges with an apparent connection to VIM, nothing.

Any ideas what might have happened or where to look for a solution?

Thx

truc · Advocate Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 3199

did you change you terminal? if not, try with an other one (eg: rxvt-unicode )
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foxicatko · n00b Joined: 15 Mar 2008 Posts: 14

No, I haven't done anything to my terminal, I'm using xterm-232 and AFAIK I've been using it for quite a long time now. However, I've tried Xfce's default 'terminal' and vim works great there.

Thank you for your help, I'll try to look deeper into the issue to find out why this had happened.

svozil · n00b Joined: 23 Sep 2005 Posts: 13

I am experiencing the same problem. I wonder if somebody found a reason of this weird behavior. I tried to reinstall both term and vim, no success. Maybe something is wrong with terminfo, not sure. It works well with urxvt, but not with xterm. However, I spend a considerable time to set .Xdefaults for xterm, so I do not want to give it up that easily.

Inimi · n00b Joined: 15 Feb 2008 Posts: 30

Hi,

did you add the USE-Flag "minimal" to vim?

I had a similar problem and this was the problem. I had to remove the "minimal" Flag.

svozil · n00b Joined: 23 Sep 2005 Posts: 13

Strange, when I build a minimal VIM, it behaves correctly. However, minimal VIM does not suite my needs (no syntax highlighting etc.).

user118696 · Apprentice Joined: 16 Sep 2005 Posts: 276

Masking

=x11-xterms/xterm-232

into /etc/portage/package.mask and DOWNGRADING to xterm-229 solved this issue. Now waiting for the next stable release before upgrading xterm.

thor_n · n00b Joined: 30 Sep 2003 Posts: 40 Location: Slovakia

It still doesn't work in xterm 232, 234, 235.

Masking:
=x11-terms/xterm-232
=x11-terms/xterm-234
=x11-terms/xterm-235

Naib · Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2008 8:52 am Post subject:

make a new user and try with that user
it may be a user setting thats causing it
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thor_n · n00b Joined: 30 Sep 2003 Posts: 40 Location: Slovakia

No, I tried with completely new user with no settings at all and same behaviour.

Sticking with xterm-229.

bob doe · Apprentice Joined: 11 Jun 2007 Posts: 207

When I first started playing with Linux, I used a few distros; Red Hat, Ubuntu, Mandrake, and Fedora Core. (forget which versions exactly) It seems that vi commands were different for each of these distros so I said F it and switched to nano. Been using it ever since.

nano FTW

thor_n · n00b Joined: 30 Sep 2003 Posts: 40 Location: Slovakia

This thread is about arrow keys in vim jumping by words not by characters - which is a pain in the butt.

When it comes to editor preference I spend 99% of editing in emacs but vim is still great tool.