Can someone please tell me why do I get these weird characters as I type in my command line? If I press down a key I get ^[ and things like it.
Also, how can I quit vim mode? I can't click anywhere or make changes to the text.
This happens because you are in insert mode and it is expecting characters, so it converts the up and down buttons to those characters.
To quit vim:
Hit the Esc key; that goes into command mode. Then you can type
:q to quit (short for :quit)
You can find more info here.
Related
I use the vi editor on the command line, and I really like it.
I use
set -o vi
to set the bindings.
The only thing is that I have to use the up and down arrows to cycle through the
previous executed commands.
In the emacs key bindings it was Ctrl+p to get to the previous command. It is the one emacs binding I miss.
I have been looking for something like it vi - but can't find it. My search gets diverted to the text editing vi binding for previous command which is held in " : " or hitting Ctrl+F to get a command window. I am using vi on the command line instead of emacs. There has to be something.
Is there something comparable in the vi command line ?
Using the Up / Down arrow keys is driving me nuts.
Actually I found the answer on this on this site:
Working Productively in Bash's Vi Command Line Editing Mode (with Cheat Sheet)
Make sure set -o vi is set to 'on'. Hit Ctrl+[ or escape to get to command mode. Then tap k go up the history and j to go down. It is so intuitive that I imagine most vi power-users discover it without trying, without help.
Thanks.
I am running Emacs on a unix server, which I access using PuTTY. Occasionally, I accidentally type some combination of keystrokes that causes all future input to be interpreted as a period. I'm pretty sure this always starts when I'm in Emacs, but it continues after exiting (ctrl-xc still works), so if I exit and try to enter something at the prompt it just looks like "....".
I have no idea what I'm doing that causes this. Any ideas?
I agree with phils comment to the question. But In emacs whenever you like to see what you have just pressed, There is a C-h l which gives you the history of keystrokes
In vimtutor Lesson 2.1: DELETION COMMANDS, there is a note after the #4 item:
The letter d will appear on the last line of the screen as you type it. Vim is waiting for you to type w. If you see another character than d you typed something wrong; press <ESC> and start over.
However, I do not see intermediate commands in the last line as the note says. How do I enable this? What option should I set in my .vimrc?
You can use
:set showcmd
That will display the commands as you type it in Vim.
The same can also be put into .vimrc
This 'last line' is the line at bottom of screen.
If you don't see this you may have trouble with (Linux?) terminal setting.
If you use terminal on Linux system, try to invoke command export TERM=Linux before running Vim.
I'm using zsh in OS X Terminal.app and for quite a while, I've been longing for a way to jump back and forth between prev/next prompts in the terminal's output.
One convenience with this would be to be able to review (and track errors at) the end of each command's output; eg. when you building stuff from source with ./configure; make; make install. Note: I'm obviously not referring to jumping back and forth in the command-history, but for a way to take a peek at the endings of each command's output.
Has anyone heard of such functionality in the *nix (preferrably also Mac) world? Would it require some sort of OS-centric Terminal plugin, or can it be programmatically done via a shell script which can be tied to a keyboard shortcut? Maybe I'm the only one thinking about this? :)
Edit: Here's an example scenario: Let's say I want to compile and install some program (using standard ./configure && make && make install procedure) and after the make command, I run into some errors. Now, the way I understand it (I may be completely wrong), the crucial error causing the make command to fail usually shows up in the last line(s) in the output, no? Anyway, at this point, I might do something like cat INSTALL to read up on the INSTALL document to check whether there's something I've missed. NOW, if I want to go back to see what the error was, that caused my initial make command to fail, I then have to manually scroll up to that position again, since my cat INSTALL command printed a ton of text after it.
I don't know if this scenario is the most elucidative – but there are many other situations where I wish I could just "jump" back to previous prompt lines and check up on previous command output; whether it was a simple ls command, make, git status, or whatever it was – swapping positions in the window by means of using prompt lines as "bookmark" positions seems an interesting idea to me.
command + left or right goes between tabs in iterm. is this what you are asking?
Emacs has a shell-mode that runs a shell inside the Emacs editor, providing a rich environment of additional commands for navigating and working with shell commands. This includes commands for going to the previous/next prompt, and deleting the output from commands so you can "clean up" and issue another command.
If you aren't familiar with Emacs: to start a shell inside Emacs, run emacs from the shell, then type Esc-x (or Meta-x, if you have "Use option as meta key" enabled in Terminal > Preferences > Settings > [profile] > Keyboard). This will ask for a command to execute. Enter shell.
To see a list of commands you can use in Shell Mode, enter Control-h m. Here are the ones for moving the cursor to the previous/next prompt:
C-c C-n comint-next-prompt
C-c C-p comint-previous-prompt
These commands would also be useful:
C-c C-r comint-show-output
C-c C-o comint-delete-output
In GNU screen, I want to change the default command binding to Alt-s (by tweaking .screenrc) instead of the default C-a, the reason is I use emacs hence GNU screen binds the C-a key, sending "C-a" to the emacs becomes tedious (as #Nils said, to send "C-a" I should type "C-a a"), as well as "C-a" in bash shell, and I could change the escape to C- but some of them are already mapped in emacs and other combinations are not as easy as ALT-s . If anyone has already done a ALT key mapping, please do let me know.
It is possible to work around :escape command limitations using registers and :bindkey command. Just put this in .screenrc:
# reset escape key to the default
escape ^Aa
# auxiliary register
register S ^A
# Alt + x produces ^A and acts as an escape key
bindkey "^[x" process S
## Alt + space produces ^A and acts as an escape key
# bindkey "^[ " process S
See http://adb.cba.pl/gnu-screen-tips-page-my.html#howto-alt-key-as-escape
From my reading of man screen it seems like the only meta character that screen can use for the command binding is CTRL:
escape xy
Set the command character to x and the character generating a literal
command character (by triggering the "meta" command) to y (similar to
the -e option). Each argument is either a single character, a two-character
sequence of the form "^x" (meaning "C-x"), a backslash followed by an octal
number (specifying the ASCII code of the character), or a backslash followed
by a second character, such as "\^" or "\\". The default is "^Aa".
If there is some mapping that you don't use in emacs, even if it's inconvenient, like C-|, then you could use your terminal input manager to remap ALT-X to that, letting you use the ALT binding instead. That would be a little hackish though.
I'm an Emacs and screen user as well. Although I rarely use Emacs in a terminal -- and as such in a screen session -- I didn't want to give up C-a for the shell either (which uses Emacs key bindings). My solution was to use C-j as the prefix key for screen, which I was willing to sacrifice. In Emacs programming modes it is bound to (newline-and-indent) which I bound to RET as well, so I really don't miss it.
By the way: I know this is an advise rather than an answer, but I felt this would be valuable enough to post nevertheless.
To make Alt+X the default prefix for commands and free C-a, add the following lines to .screenrc:
escape ^||
bindkey "^[x" command
As a side effect C-| will be command prefix too. If you need this keys to be free too, then fix "escape ^||" accordingly.
Screen doesn't have any shorthand syntax for alt bindings, but you can give it the octal code directly. For instance on my machine, Alt-x has the hex code F8, or 370 octal, so putting
escape \370x
in my screenrc changed the escape code to alt-X
Tested and works with screen 4.00.03 on Linux.
You may have to change the escape, since I think this may depend on things like your language and codeset, etc: how I found out what my escape code was was to type
$ echo -n ^QM-x | perl -ne 'printf "%lo\n", ord($_)'
^Q is the quoted-insert command for readline (it inserts what you type directly without trying to interpret it) and M-x was a literal Alt-X.
Fellow emacs user here.
The best solution I've found is a ~/.screenrc file with the following:
# C-a :source .screenrc
escape ^gg
Live updated here: https://gist.github.com/1058111
See also: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=498675
Something I have had for years in my .screenrc:
escape ^Zz
which is now hardwired in muscle memory for me.
Somehow I ended up having to share a screen with someone else's config, and now I keep stopping processes all the time (bash ^Z)... Not funny...