Nvi FAQ

How can I get vi to display my character set?
1. Vi 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 vi 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:

1. If there's no other solution, you can use the print and noprint edit options of vi to specify that a specific character is printable or not printable.
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My map commands won't work.
1. 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! Vi follows the POSIX 1003.2 standard on this one, and makes this consistent, always placing the cursor on the first character.
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I'm using ksh or csh as my vi edit option shell value, and file expansions don't work right.

1. 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.
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How does the iclower edit option differ from the ignorecase (i.e. ic) edit option?

1. 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.
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1. 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.
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1. 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 character that starts cursor key sequences doesn't have any characters following it.
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1. Vi 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 vi from attempting to acquire any locks on the files you edit.
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When I compile vi I get lots of warnings about pointer assignments being incompatible.

1. Vi is partially written to support wide characters. When this code interfaces with the code that doesn't yet support wide characters, the pointer types clash. This will hopefully be fixed in the near future, but I've been saying that for awhile, now.
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1. This is almost certainly a problem with the system's terminfo or termcap information for your terminal. If the terminfo/termcap entry doesn't have the settable scrolling region capabilities, or the more powerful scrolling commands, these behaviors can result. Historic implementations of vi, and some of the vi clones, don't suffer from this problem because they wrote their own screen support instead of using the curses library.
2. The solution is to find a good terminfo or termcap entry for your terminal, which will fix the problem for all of the applications on your system, not just vi. Eric Raymond maintains the freely redistributable termcap/terminfo entries. They can be downloaded from http://www.ccil.org/~esr/ncurses.html, or you can contact him at esr@snark.thyrsus.com.
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1. Your system's curses implementation is broken. You should use the curses implementation provided with vi or a curses replacement such as ncurses. Eric Raymond is one of the maintainers of the freely redistributable ncurses package. You can download ncurses from http://www.ccil.org/~esr/ncurses.html, or you can contact him at esr@snark.thyrsus.com.
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When I use vi on a Sun console (terminal type sun-34) the screen is occasionally trashed, usually when exiting vi.

1. The Sun console can't handle the 'al' capability of the termcap entry (the il1 capability of terminfo entries). If you delete that entry from your terminfo/termcap information everything should work correctly.
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I don't have a version of ctags (or I have ctags, but it doesn't tag nearly enough things).

1. There's a version of ctags available on the 4.4BSD-Lite distributions, as well as the FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux and GNU distributions. Or, you might want to try Exuberant Ctags:
2. Title: Exuberant Ctags Version: 1.3 Entered-date: 16JUN96 Description: A better ctags which generates tags for all possible tag types: macro definitions, enumerated values (values inside enum{...}), function and method definitions, enum/struct/union tags, external function prototypes (optional), typedefs, and variable declarations. It is far less easily fooled by code containing #if preprocessor conditional constructs, using a conditional path selection algorithm to resolve complicated choices, and a fall-back algorithm when this one fails. Can also be used to print out a list of selected objects found in source files. Keywords: ctags, tags, exuberant Author: darren@sirsi.com (Darren Hiebert) darren@hiwaay.net (Darren Hiebert) Maintained-by: darren@sirsi.com (Darren Hiebert) darren@hiwaay.net (Darren Hiebert) Primary-site: sunsite.unc.edu /pub/Linux/devel/lang/c 27kB ctags-1.3.tar.gz Alternate-site: ftp.halcyon.com /local/gvr 27kB ctags-1.3.tar.gz Original-site: Platforms: UNIX, MSDOS, WindowsNT, Windows95, OS/2, Amiga Copying-policy: Public domain
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When I update a file I already have open, and use :e to reread it, I get nul's for the rest of the file.

1. Your system's implementation of mmap(2) has a bug; you will have to exit vi and re-execute it.
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1. Cscope is available on UNIXWare System V Release 4.0 variants such as Sun Solaris 2.x (/opt/SUNWspro/bin) and UNIXWare System V Release 4.1.
2. You can buy version 13.3 source with an unrestricted license for $400 from AT&T Software Solutions by calling +1-800-462-8146. Binary redistribution of cscope is an additional $1500, one-time flat fee.
3. For more information, see AT&T's cscope web page.
4. Also, an Open Source version of cscope is available at http://cscope.sourceforge.net/
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1. Make sure you're using the regular expression package supplied with nvi. The word boundary matching was an extension to the POSIX 1003.2 RE standard, and most vendor RE implementations don't have it.
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