Take the 2-minute tour ×

I took a couple screenshots of the problem I'm having. Basically what I'm used to with vi and what I'm expecting, is to be able to move around the document using the arrow keys, and still be able to read the actual content of the document.

Here is a shot of vi editor as I initially open a configuration file.

A shot of vi again, after I have pressed the down, left, and right arrow keys a few times.

If for some reason you cannot view the screenshots, what I see is: as I move the cursor around in vi, the place where my cursor just was gets replaced by numbers, commas, dashes, or curly braces. Sometimes it jumps one character over, but sometimes it jumps several.

Obviously I'm doing something wrong here. And here I thought I knew how to use vi...

share|improve this question
add comment

2 Answers

up vote 0 down vote accepted

I'm not exactly why the problem occured, but I do know what fixed it.


As you can tell from the screenshot, I was in an SSH session. I disconnected and re-established a new SSH connection.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Please try runnning vi with different terminal emulation to see if it makes difference. I reckon its terminal related.

Something like:

TERM=linux vi


TERM=vt100 vi

Also running 'reset' command might also help without reconnecting. This resets terminal to its defaults.

share|improve this answer
add comment

Your Answer


