Saturday, December 31, 2022

Simple Vim questions -- Backspace + Escape in maps

I used Vi for many years (on Unix) then stopped, but need it again (on Windows 10). There are couple of things that I used to be able to do in my sleep but no longer master, and the online information is hard to use (it talks about very complicated things but I was not able to find simple answers to simple questions).

 

1. Backspace in insert mode, over some characters, gives a special character instead of erasing. I remember that this was a feature, not a bug – a way to type special characters when they were troublesome to produce otherwise. I don't need that facility, which is very annoying; I just want backspace to erase. What should I do? My settings file (_vimrc) currently has

 

              set bs=2

 

2. How do I represent ESC in a macro (my name for the result of a "map")? I want to define something like

 

              :map v iSOME TEXT<Esc>

 

so that when I type "v" it will insert SOME_TEXT at the current position and then escape (get out of insert mode). But I no longer know how to type what appears above as <Esc> when entering the macro. I remembered various incantations involving CTRL-V or CTRL-G but they do not seem to work.

 

Very basic stuff, I just forgot.

 

Help will be much appreciated.

 

With best regards,

 

-- Bertrand Meyer

New book just out: Handbook of Requirements and Business Analysis, Springer, 2022

A treatise and textbook on requirements, see https://se.ethz.ch/requirements

 

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