Macos – Unintentional vi mode in iTerm on Mac

command lineiterm2macosvim

I occasionally find that while working in iTerm the default Readline key bindings are replaced with the vi keybindings.

For example, I will try to go to the beginning of the line with ctrl–a, and instead it will print the character ^A, and then I won't be able to insert any text until I enter insert mode. I know this can be configured by setting the editing-mode in my inputrc file, but I don’t have that set in mine. Is there a way that I could be dynamically entering vi mode?

Best Answer

I believe this issue is related to the way the Mac OS X terminal handles terminal emulation and even color coding—which is related to control sequences—as explained in this blog post:

After upgrading to Lion I noticed that the Homebrew theme that I’ve been using since Snow Leopard doesn’t display colors correctly(using different colors for directories, different types of files etc.) any more when working on remote hosts via ssh (local dir colors still work though) and switching to other themes doesn’t help. After messing around with the Terminal settings I finally found the cause and a solution. It seems Lion changed the terminal type to xterm-color256 during the upgrade (don’t remember what the setting was in SL though). The solution is simple enough, just change the emulation type for terminal from xterm-color256 to xterm-color (see screenshot below).

Fair warning, some of the advice in that comment thread is out of date since there no longer is a xterm-color in the terminal as of Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion). But I believe adjusting items in the “Advanced” tab (pictured) might help:

enter image description here

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Possible to use modal editing inside Vim’s command-line mode

Vim actually has several modes, of which normal and insert are just the most obvious. So to say...

To enter the command-line window from command-line mode (the mode you're in after you press :), press Ctrl-F. Now you're in the command-line window, where you can write up a command just like in insert, and edit it kinda like in normal mode. Enter will execute the command.

An example:

press : ("to get into" cmdline)
press Ctrl-F
press a
write echom "Hello world!"
press Esc
press Enter

It will echo' the "Hello world!" on the commandline, just like as if you've written that command from the cmdline.

Does this make any sense?

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Total shot in the dark: do you have the following line in your ~/.vimrc?

set list listchars=tab:\ \ ,trail:

Try commenting it out with a " at the beginning of the line and restarting vim.

I picked it up from somebody's dotfiles repo and haven't had a chance to track down why it's causing problems.

I'm running iTerm2. My $TERM is xterm. Hope that helps.

Best Answer

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