Putting SSH keys I’ve taken from Ubuntu

You can do it easily using ssh port forwarding. Open terminal and enter

ssh -L 5900:localhost:5900 remote_ip

with any other applicable settings you need. This will forward port 5900 on your local machine to port 5900 on the remote machine. If you need to change to a different local port (say, if you're already running a VNC server on your local machine), change the first 5900 to something else.

Then once the ssh connection is running, just VNC to localhost:5900, and you should get a connection to your remote machine.

If you don't have a VNC client already, there's one built in to Mac OS X. Open Finder, press ⌘K and enter vnc://localhost:5900 as shown below, and hit connect.

I would recommend changing from x-term256color to xterm for your TERM variable as that seems to have resolved my similar issues.

The things I saw (in addition to the question's symptoms) are often to have line over-flow issues within the vi session. That is if I type beyond a certain number of columns then the rest of the text is put onto the next line (i.e. with a new line \n character in place). This overflowed text is not displayed in the current vi session but I will see it after reopening.

Another problem is occasionally the cursor is displayed on one line but I will start editing the next line down..... a real pain when you are writing code!