Annotation of src/usr.bin/vi/FAQ, Revision 1.2
1.2 ! michaels 1: @(#)FAQ 8.10 (Berkeley) 8/10/96
1.1 deraadt 2:
1.2 ! michaels 3: Q: How can I get vi to display my character set?
! 4: A: Vi uses the C library routine isprint(3) to determine if a character
1.1 deraadt 5: is printable, or should be displayed as an octal or hexadecimal value
1.2 ! michaels 6: on the screen. Generally, if vi is displaying printable characters
1.1 deraadt 7: in octal/hexadecimal forms, your environment is not configured correctly.
8: Try looking at the man pages that allow you to configure your locale.
9: For example, to configure an ISO 8859-1 locale under Solaris using csh,
10: you would do:
11:
12: setenv LANG C
13: setenv LC_CTYPE iso_8859_1
14:
15: Other LC_CTYPE systems/values that I'm told work:
16:
17: System Value
18: ====== =====
19: FreeBSD lt_LN.ISO_8859-1
20: HP-UX 9.X american.iso88591
21: HP-UX 10.X en_US.iso88591
22: SunOS 4.X iso_8859_1
23: SunOS 5.X iso_8859_1
24:
25: Q: My map won't work!
26: A: One thing that you should immediately check if a vi map doesn't work
27: is if depends on the final cursor position after a P or p command.
28: Historic vi's were inconsistent as to the final position of the cursor,
29: and, to make matter worse, the final cursor position also depended on
1.2 ! michaels 30: whether the put text came from a named or unnamed buffer! Vi follows
1.1 deraadt 31: the POSIX 1003.2 standard on this one, and makes this consistent, always
32: placing the cursor on the first character.
33:
34: Q: I'm using ksh or csh as my vi edit option shell value, and file
35: expansions don't work right!
36: A: The problem may be in your ksh or csh startup files, e.g., .cshrc. Vi
37: executes the shell to do name expansion, and the shell generally reads
38: its startup files. If the startup files are not correctly configured
39: for non-interactive use, e.g., they always echo a prompt to the screen,
40: vi will be unable to parse the output and things will not work
41: correctly.
42:
43: Q: How does the iclower edit option differ from the ignorecase (i.e. ic)
44: edit option?
45: A: The difference is that the ignorecase edit option always ignores the
46: case of letters in the Regular Expression (RE), and the iclower edit
47: option only ignores the case if there are no upper-case letters in the
48: RE. If any upper-case letters appear in the Regular Expression, then
49: it will be treated case-sensitively, as if the ignorecase edit option
50: was not set.
51:
1.2 ! michaels 52: Q: When I edit binary files, vi appends a <newline> to the last line!
1.1 deraadt 53: A: This is historic practice for vi, and further, it's required by the
54: POSIX 1003.2 standard. My intent is to provide a command line and/or
55: edit option to turn this behavior off when I switch to version 2.0 of
56: the Berkeley DB package.
57:
58: Q: My cursor keys don't work when I'm in text input mode!
59: A: A common problem over slow links is that the set of characters sent by
60: the cursor keys don't arrive close enough together for vi to understand
61: that they are a single keystroke, and not separate keystrokes. Try
62: increasing the value of the escapetime edit option, which will cause
63: vi to wait longer before deciding that the <escape> character that
64: starts cursor key sequences doesn't have any characters following it.
65:
1.2 ! michaels 66: Q: When I edit some files, vi seems to hang forever, and I have to kill it.
! 67: A: Vi uses flock(2) and fcntl(2) to do file locking. When it attempts to
1.1 deraadt 68: acquired a lock for a file on an NFS mounted filesystem, it can hang
69: for a very long (perhaps infinite) period of time. Turning off the
1.2 ! michaels 70: "lock" edit option will keep vi from attempting to acquire any locks
1.1 deraadt 71: on the files you edit.
1.2 ! michaels 72:
! 73: Q: When I compile vi I get lots of warnings about pointer assignments
! 74: being incompatible!
! 75: A: Vi is partially written to support wide characters. When this code
! 76: interfaces with the code that doesn't yet support wide characters,
! 77: the pointer types clash. This will hopefully be fixed in the near
! 78: future, but I've been saying that for awhile, now.
! 79:
! 80: Q: I get jumpy scrolling behavior in the screen!
! 81: A: This is almost certainly a problem with the system's terminfo or
! 82: termcap information for your terminal. If the terminfo/termcap entry
! 83: doesn't have the settable scrolling region capabilities, or the more
! 84: powerful scrolling commands, these behaviors can result. Historic
! 85: implementations of vi, and some of the vi clones, don't suffer from
! 86: this problem because they wrote their own screen support instead of
! 87: using the curses library.
! 88:
! 89: The solution is to find a good terminfo or termcap entry for your
! 90: terminal, which will fix the problem for all of the applications on
! 91: your system, not just vi. Eric Raymond maintains the freely
! 92: redistributable termcap/terminfo entries. They can be downloaded
! 93: from http://www.ccil.org/~esr/ncurses.html, or you can contact him
! 94: at esr@snark.thyrsus.com.
! 95:
! 96: Q: The entire screen repaints on every keystroke!
! 97: A: Your system's curses implementation is broken. You should use the
! 98: curses implementation provided with vi or a curses replacment such as
! 99: ncurses. Eric Raymond is one of the maintainers of the freely
! 100: redistributable ncurses package. You can download ncurses from
! 101: http://www.ccil.org/~esr/ncurses.html, or you can contact him at
! 102: esr@snark.thyrsus.com.
! 103:
! 104: Q: When I use vi on a Sun console (terminal type sun-34) the screen
! 105: is occasionally trashed, usually when exiting vi!
! 106: A: The Sun console can't handle the 'al' capability of the termcap
! 107: entry (the il1 capability of terminfo entries). If you delete that
! 108: entry from your terminfo/termcap information everything should work
! 109: correctly.
! 110:
! 111: Q: I don't have a version of ctags (or I have ctags, but it doesn't tag
! 112: nearly enough things)!
! 113: A: There's a version of ctags available on the 4.4BSD-Lite distributions,
! 114: as well as the FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux and GNU distributions. Or, you
! 115: might want to try Exuberant Ctags:
! 116:
! 117: Title: Exuberant Ctags
! 118: Version: 1.3
! 119: Entered-date: 16JUN96
! 120: Description:
! 121: A better ctags which generates tags for all possible tag types:
! 122: macro definitions, enumerated values (values inside enum{...}),
! 123: function and method definitions, enum/struct/union tags, external
! 124: function prototypes (optional), typedefs, and variable
! 125: declarations. It is far less easily fooled by code containing #if
! 126: preprocessor conditional constructs, using a conditional path
! 127: selection algorithm to resolve complicated choices, and a
! 128: fall-back algorithm when this one fails. Can also be used to print
! 129: out a list of selected objects found in source files.
! 130: Keywords: ctags, tags, exuberant
! 131: Author: darren@sirsi.com (Darren Hiebert)
! 132: darren@hiwaay.net (Darren Hiebert)
! 133: Maintained-by: darren@sirsi.com (Darren Hiebert)
! 134: darren@hiwaay.net (Darren Hiebert)
! 135: Primary-site: sunsite.unc.edu /pub/Linux/devel/lang/c
! 136: 27kB ctags-1.3.tar.gz
! 137: Alternate-site: ftp.halcyon.com /local/gvr
! 138: 27kB ctags-1.3.tar.gz
! 139: Original-site:
! 140: Platforms: UNIX, MSDOS, WindowsNT, Windows95, OS/2, Amiga
! 141: Copying-policy: Public domain
! 142:
! 143: Q: When I update a file I already have open, and use :e to reread it, I
! 144: get nul's for the rest of the file!
! 145: A: Your system's implementation of mmap(2) has a bug; you will have to
! 146: exit vi and re-execute it.
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