For some reason my Escape key suddenly doesn’t seem to work, at least in the context of “vi”. It’s essential in that program for dropping back out of text entry mode into command mode (for such things as, oh, saving and quitting).
I can’t find any references to broken Esc keys in tiMacs anywhere online, so I don’t know if this is common or rare, if it’s a crumb under the key or a short of some kind, or even some bizarre kinds of software failure/bug/feature.
It sure makes editing simple text files (such as, oh, .htaccess) a lot more difficult, especially since TextEdit seems to insist on saving stuff as RTF instead of allowing simple text files. What’s up with that?
Broken Esc key?!?
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3 responses to “Broken Esc key?!?”
Good riddance vi! My stance is this: I love a power text editor as much as the next guy, so I live in BBEdit. For the few things I need to do at the command line that I can’t do in BBEdit (and that isn’t much, since you can install the BB unix tool and type bbedit filename), I’ve switched to pico. Guess what? No modes. It works like a text editor. Move around with the arrow keys, delete stuff, type, you know, a plain text editor, just happens to be at the command line.
Screw vi.
sudo pico filename
By the way you can turn off RTF for TextEdit in the preferences.
I say I use pico but I haven’t actual used pico for quite a while. When I’m in a UNIX shell these days it’s a Debian box, so I get nano instead. I forget what nano does that pico doesn’t.