Annotation of src/usr.bin/vi/FAQ, Revision 1.4
1.4 ! downsj 1: @(#)FAQ 8.13 (Berkeley) 10/14/96
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
1.3 michaels 24:
25: If there's no other solution, you can use the print and noprint edit
26: options of vi to specify that a specific character is printable or not
27: printable.
1.1 deraadt 28:
29: Q: My map won't work!
30: A: One thing that you should immediately check if a vi map doesn't work
31: is if depends on the final cursor position after a P or p command.
32: Historic vi's were inconsistent as to the final position of the cursor,
33: and, to make matter worse, the final cursor position also depended on
1.2 michaels 34: whether the put text came from a named or unnamed buffer! Vi follows
1.1 deraadt 35: the POSIX 1003.2 standard on this one, and makes this consistent, always
36: placing the cursor on the first character.
37:
38: Q: I'm using ksh or csh as my vi edit option shell value, and file
39: expansions don't work right!
40: A: The problem may be in your ksh or csh startup files, e.g., .cshrc. Vi
41: executes the shell to do name expansion, and the shell generally reads
42: its startup files. If the startup files are not correctly configured
43: for non-interactive use, e.g., they always echo a prompt to the screen,
44: vi will be unable to parse the output and things will not work
45: correctly.
46:
47: Q: How does the iclower edit option differ from the ignorecase (i.e. ic)
48: edit option?
49: A: The difference is that the ignorecase edit option always ignores the
50: case of letters in the Regular Expression (RE), and the iclower edit
51: option only ignores the case if there are no upper-case letters in the
52: RE. If any upper-case letters appear in the Regular Expression, then
53: it will be treated case-sensitively, as if the ignorecase edit option
54: was not set.
55:
1.2 michaels 56: Q: When I edit binary files, vi appends a <newline> to the last line!
1.1 deraadt 57: A: This is historic practice for vi, and further, it's required by the
58: POSIX 1003.2 standard. My intent is to provide a command line and/or
59: edit option to turn this behavior off when I switch to version 2.0 of
60: the Berkeley DB package.
61:
62: Q: My cursor keys don't work when I'm in text input mode!
63: A: A common problem over slow links is that the set of characters sent by
64: the cursor keys don't arrive close enough together for vi to understand
65: that they are a single keystroke, and not separate keystrokes. Try
66: increasing the value of the escapetime edit option, which will cause
67: vi to wait longer before deciding that the <escape> character that
68: starts cursor key sequences doesn't have any characters following it.
69:
1.2 michaels 70: Q: When I edit some files, vi seems to hang forever, and I have to kill it.
71: A: Vi uses flock(2) and fcntl(2) to do file locking. When it attempts to
1.1 deraadt 72: acquired a lock for a file on an NFS mounted filesystem, it can hang
73: for a very long (perhaps infinite) period of time. Turning off the
1.2 michaels 74: "lock" edit option will keep vi from attempting to acquire any locks
1.1 deraadt 75: on the files you edit.
1.2 michaels 76:
77: Q: When I compile vi I get lots of warnings about pointer assignments
78: being incompatible!
79: A: Vi is partially written to support wide characters. When this code
80: interfaces with the code that doesn't yet support wide characters,
81: the pointer types clash. This will hopefully be fixed in the near
82: future, but I've been saying that for awhile, now.
83:
84: Q: I get jumpy scrolling behavior in the screen!
85: A: This is almost certainly a problem with the system's terminfo or
86: termcap information for your terminal. If the terminfo/termcap entry
87: doesn't have the settable scrolling region capabilities, or the more
88: powerful scrolling commands, these behaviors can result. Historic
89: implementations of vi, and some of the vi clones, don't suffer from
90: this problem because they wrote their own screen support instead of
91: using the curses library.
92:
93: The solution is to find a good terminfo or termcap entry for your
94: terminal, which will fix the problem for all of the applications on
95: your system, not just vi. Eric Raymond maintains the freely
96: redistributable termcap/terminfo entries. They can be downloaded
97: from http://www.ccil.org/~esr/ncurses.html, or you can contact him
98: at esr@snark.thyrsus.com.
99:
100: Q: The entire screen repaints on every keystroke!
101: A: Your system's curses implementation is broken. You should use the
1.3 michaels 102: curses implementation provided with vi or a curses replacement such
103: as ncurses. Eric Raymond is one of the maintainers of the freely
1.2 michaels 104: redistributable ncurses package. You can download ncurses from
105: http://www.ccil.org/~esr/ncurses.html, or you can contact him at
106: esr@snark.thyrsus.com.
107:
108: Q: When I use vi on a Sun console (terminal type sun-34) the screen
109: is occasionally trashed, usually when exiting vi!
110: A: The Sun console can't handle the 'al' capability of the termcap
111: entry (the il1 capability of terminfo entries). If you delete that
112: entry from your terminfo/termcap information everything should work
113: correctly.
114:
115: Q: I don't have a version of ctags (or I have ctags, but it doesn't tag
116: nearly enough things)!
117: A: There's a version of ctags available on the 4.4BSD-Lite distributions,
118: as well as the FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux and GNU distributions. Or, you
119: might want to try Exuberant Ctags:
120:
121: Title: Exuberant Ctags
122: Version: 1.3
123: Entered-date: 16JUN96
124: Description:
125: A better ctags which generates tags for all possible tag types:
126: macro definitions, enumerated values (values inside enum{...}),
127: function and method definitions, enum/struct/union tags, external
128: function prototypes (optional), typedefs, and variable
129: declarations. It is far less easily fooled by code containing #if
130: preprocessor conditional constructs, using a conditional path
131: selection algorithm to resolve complicated choices, and a
132: fall-back algorithm when this one fails. Can also be used to print
133: out a list of selected objects found in source files.
134: Keywords: ctags, tags, exuberant
135: Author: darren@sirsi.com (Darren Hiebert)
136: darren@hiwaay.net (Darren Hiebert)
137: Maintained-by: darren@sirsi.com (Darren Hiebert)
138: darren@hiwaay.net (Darren Hiebert)
139: Primary-site: sunsite.unc.edu /pub/Linux/devel/lang/c
140: 27kB ctags-1.3.tar.gz
141: Alternate-site: ftp.halcyon.com /local/gvr
142: 27kB ctags-1.3.tar.gz
143: Original-site:
144: Platforms: UNIX, MSDOS, WindowsNT, Windows95, OS/2, Amiga
145: Copying-policy: Public domain
146:
147: Q: When I update a file I already have open, and use :e to reread it, I
148: get nul's for the rest of the file!
149: A: Your system's implementation of mmap(2) has a bug; you will have to
150: exit vi and re-execute it.
1.4 ! downsj 151:
! 152: Q: Where can I get cscope?
! 153: A: Cscope is available on UNIXWare System V Release 4.0 variants such as
! 154: Sun Solaris 2.x (/opt/SUNWspro/bin) and UNIXWare System V Release 4.1.
! 155:
! 156: You can buy version 13.3 source with an unrestricted license for $400
! 157: from AT&T Software Solutions by calling +1-800-462-8146. Binary
! 158: redistribution of cscope is an additional $1500, one-time flat fee.
! 159:
! 160: For more information, see http://www.unipress.com/att/new/cscope.html.
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