NetBSD/usr.bin/vi/FAQ

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@(#)FAQ 8.5 (Berkeley) 5/9/96
Q: How can I get nvi to display my character set?
A: Nvi uses the C library routine isprint(3) to determine if a character
is printable, or should be displayed as an octal or hexadecimal value
on the screen. Generally, if nvi is displaying printable characters
in octal/hexadecimal forms, your environment is not configured correctly.
Try looking at the man pages that allow you to configure your locale.
For example, to configure an ISO 8859-1 locale under Solaris using csh,
you would do:
setenv LANG C
setenv LC_CTYPE iso_8859_1
Other LC_CTYPE systems/values that I'm told work:
System Value
====== =====
FreeBSD lt_LN.ISO_8859-1
HP-UX 9.X american.iso88591
HP-UX 10.X en_US.iso88591
SunOS 4.X iso_8859_1
SunOS 5.X iso_8859_1
Q: My map won't work!
A: One thing that you should immediately check if a vi map doesn't work
is if depends on the final cursor position after a P or p command.
Historic vi's were inconsistent as to the final position of the cursor,
and, to make matter worse, the final cursor position also depended on
whether the put text came from a named or unnamed buffer! Nvi follows
the POSIX 1003.2 standard on this one, and makes this consistent, always
placing the cursor on the first character.
Q: I'm using ksh or csh as my vi edit option shell value, and file
expansions don't work right!
A: The problem may be in your ksh or csh startup files, e.g., .cshrc. Vi
executes the shell to do name expansion, and the shell generally reads
its startup files. If the startup files are not correctly configured
for non-interactive use, e.g., they always echo a prompt to the screen,
vi will be unable to parse the output and things will not work
correctly.
Q: How does the iclower edit option differ from the ignorecase (i.e. ic)
edit option?
A: The difference is that the ignorecase edit option always ignores the
case of letters in the Regular Expression (RE), and the iclower edit
option only ignores the case if there are no upper-case letters in the
RE. If any upper-case letters appear in the Regular Expression, then
it will be treated case-sensitively, as if the ignorecase edit option
was not set.
Q: When I edit binary files, nvi appends a <newline> to the last line!
A: This is historic practice for vi, and further, it's required by the
POSIX 1003.2 standard. My intent is to provide a command line and/or
edit option to turn this behavior off when I switch to version 2.0 of
the Berkeley DB package.
Q: My cursor keys don't work when I'm in text input mode!
A: A common problem over slow links is that the set of characters sent by
the cursor keys don't arrive close enough together for vi to understand
that they are a single keystroke, and not separate keystrokes. Try
increasing the value of the escapetime edit option, which will cause
vi to wait longer before deciding that the <escape> character that
starts cursor key sequences doesn't have any characters following it.
Q: When I edit some files, nvi seems to hang forever, and I have to kill it.
A: Nvi uses flock(2) and fcntl(2) to do file locking. When it attempts to
acquired a lock for a file on an NFS mounted filesystem, it can hang
for a very long (perhaps infinite) period of time. Turning off the
"lock" edit option will keep nvi from attempting to acquire any locks
on the files you edit.