Seems like these are the only to peices of software that do it...

Lets say i want to insert some text, i punch "I" and start to right but nothing appears.. i start hitting a single key and eventually it will appear... i cannot backspace, space forward... anything... when i hit the left or right arrow it breaks the line and type a "B"

Is this bash or the editor doing this? Was thinking about compiling VI from sources... but figured i'd ask first, as i've had this problem on a few other machines, the current machine is a Mandrake 9 install, pretty much OEM

That sounds very odd. What version are you using? Have you looked at your .vimrc for anything unusual. Does this also happen in the gui version? Try the ViM help mailing list. Sorry I couldn't be too helpful, but check out http://www.vim.org/maillist.php#vim

Regards,
gtnorton

hrm, seems to run OK with the following command at the VIM command line:


set nocp, which i guess gives it VIM default. Must of screwed something up. I don't have an X version, it's on an old server of mine. Koo. Thanks for your help

yeah. some versions of VI are not kind to arrow keys. it's somewhat like the korn shell. if you use the arrows, you'll get A/B/C/D. just hit escape and dd those lines that you end up getting. i don't really know the easiest way around it, but you just need to make sure you're not hitting the arrow keys when you're in INSERT mode.

well i had the same problem on slackware (arrow keys gave me a, b c or d's),
the easiest way is to create an .vimrc in your home-directory....