vim "windows"

Quakeboy02 · 12-28-2006, 05:48 PM

After being away from "Unix" for 10 years or so, I'm back and using vi (vim). Periodically, when I hit the ":" key, vim responds with, well, I'm not sure what it is: some sort of text windowing, perhaps? Maybe it's an attempt to give me the option to repeat recent commands, I dunno, but it makes more work for me and is very aggravating. Is there a way to disable this "feature"? I really want it to do ONLY what I ask it to.

PatrickNew · 12-28-2006, 06:45 PM

Well, I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but if you invoke vim with "vi" instead of "vim" it will run in vi-compatability mode, which turns off all fancy new features and makes it behave exactly like the vi you left 10 or so years ago.

burninGpi · 12-28-2006, 07:04 PM

That feature is so you can see the command as you type it. If you press the <up> or <down> cursor keys, it scrolls through previous commands.

Quakeboy02 · 12-29-2006, 12:56 AM

Thanks for the feedback, guys. Apparently I've either got a "q" key going bad or I'm actually hitting the !@#$! "q" key before ":" and it's putting me into a "command line window" instead of just giving me access to the command line. bleh