Consider removing vim-tiny from Ubuntu in the future

[Loïc Grenié]

2009/6/18 Smoot Carl-Mitchell <smoot at tic.com>:
> On Tue, 2009-06-16 at 17:15 +0300, Alexandra Zaharia wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 5:06 PM, howard chen<howachen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > To be honest, if a broken version of vi has to been exist in Ubuntu, I
>> > would rather perfer not to have vi pre-installed to please all the
>> > vi-hater.
>>
>> No such thing as 'broken' vi. Just the ones who don't know WHY once
>> upon a time vi had nothing associated to arrow keys. 'Cause there were
>> no arrow keys on those keyboards!
>
> The original reason IIRC was vi was originally written for the ADM3a
> character cell terminal.  The arrow keys were under hjkl on the
> keyboard.  You sent the arrow codes by pressing CTRL-h, CTRL-j, etc. The
> vi designer decided it was easier to avoid the CTRL press and just press
> h,j,k, and l, since the editor had an input mode and a command mode.
>
> Later the editor used the termcap and the terminfo system for mapping
> keys to common controls on the very wide variety of character cell
> terminals available at the time.

    I can't testify for the original vi (I started using it only in the early
  '90 on SunOS 4.0). However I can say that the arrow keys send
  two series of character sequences under xterm/gnome-terminal/konsole.
  For the up arrow, it can be either ESC-[-A or ESC-O-A (depending on
  which the terminal is in, the weather, the following wind). If vi is
  configured to take "ESC-[-A" as arrow, then "ESC-O-A" will look
  like: <Return to cmd mode>-<Start new line>-A. It's a pain, it has
  always been a pain and it will always be a pain until either
  someone inserts 2 "up-arrow" control sequences in vi (and others) or
  cancel one of the two sequences of arrows in the terminals.

     I'll go forward using h,j,k,l...

          Loïc, vi-lover