1@(#)FAQ	8.13 (Berkeley) 10/14/96
2
3Q: How can I get vi to display my character set?
4A: Vi uses the C library routine isprint(3) to determine if a character
5   is printable, or should be displayed as an octal or hexadecimal value
6   on the screen.  Generally, if vi is displaying printable characters
7   in octal/hexadecimal forms, your environment is not configured correctly.
8   Try looking at the man pages that allow you to configure your locale.
9   For example, to configure an ISO 8859-1 locale under Solaris using csh,
10   you would do:
11
12	setenv LANG C
13	setenv LC_CTYPE iso_8859_1
14
15   Other LC_CTYPE systems/values that I'm told work:
16
17   System	Value
18   ======	=====
19   FreeBSD	lt_LN.ISO_8859-1
20   HP-UX  9.X	american.iso88591
21   HP-UX 10.X	en_US.iso88591
22   SunOS  4.X	iso_8859_1
23   SunOS  5.X	iso_8859_1
24
25   If there's no other solution, you can use the print and noprint edit
26   options of vi to specify that a specific character is printable or not
27   printable.
28	
29Q: My map won't work!
30A: One thing that you should immediately check if a vi map doesn't work
31   is if depends on the final cursor position after a P or p command.
32   Historic vi's were inconsistent as to the final position of the cursor,
33   and, to make matter worse, the final cursor position also depended on
34   whether the put text came from a named or unnamed buffer!  Vi follows
35   the POSIX 1003.2 standard on this one, and makes this consistent, always
36   placing the cursor on the first character.
37
38Q: I'm using ksh or csh as my vi edit option shell value, and file
39   expansions don't work right!
40A: The problem may be in your ksh or csh startup files, e.g., .cshrc.  Vi
41   executes the shell to do name expansion, and the shell generally reads
42   its startup files.  If the startup files are not correctly configured
43   for non-interactive use, e.g., they always echo a prompt to the screen,
44   vi will be unable to parse the output and things will not work
45   correctly.
46
47Q: How does the iclower edit option differ from the ignorecase (i.e. ic)
48   edit option?
49A: The difference is that the ignorecase edit option always ignores the
50   case of letters in the Regular Expression (RE), and the iclower edit
51   option only ignores the case if there are no upper-case letters in the
52   RE.  If any upper-case letters appear in the Regular Expression, then
53   it will be treated case-sensitively, as if the ignorecase edit option
54   was not set.
55
56Q: When I edit binary files, vi appends a <newline> to the last line!
57A: This is historic practice for vi, and further, it's required by the
58   POSIX 1003.2 standard.  My intent is to provide a command line and/or
59   edit option to turn this behavior off when I switch to version 2.0 of
60   the Berkeley DB package.
61
62Q: My cursor keys don't work when I'm in text input mode!
63A: A common problem over slow links is that the set of characters sent by
64   the cursor keys don't arrive close enough together for vi to understand
65   that they are a single keystroke, and not separate keystrokes.  Try
66   increasing the value of the escapetime edit option, which will cause
67   vi to wait longer before deciding that the <escape> character that
68   starts cursor key sequences doesn't have any characters following it.
69
70Q: When I edit some files, vi seems to hang forever, and I have to kill it.
71A: Vi uses flock(2) and fcntl(2) to do file locking.  When it attempts to
72   acquired a lock for a file on an NFS mounted filesystem, it can hang
73   for a very long (perhaps infinite) period of time.  Turning off the
74   "lock" edit option will keep vi from attempting to acquire any locks
75   on the files you edit.
76
77Q: When I compile vi I get lots of warnings about pointer assignments
78   being incompatible!
79A: Vi is partially written to support wide characters.  When this code
80   interfaces with the code that doesn't yet support wide characters,
81   the pointer types clash.  This will hopefully be fixed in the near
82   future, but I've been saying that for awhile, now.
83
84Q: I get jumpy scrolling behavior in the screen!
85A: This is almost certainly a problem with the system's terminfo or
86   termcap information for your terminal.  If the terminfo/termcap entry
87   doesn't have the settable scrolling region capabilities, or the more
88   powerful scrolling commands, these behaviors can result.  Historic
89   implementations of vi, and some of the vi clones, don't suffer from
90   this problem because they wrote their own screen support instead of
91   using the curses library.
92
93   The solution is to find a good terminfo or termcap entry for your
94   terminal, which will fix the problem for all of the applications on
95   your system, not just vi.  Eric Raymond maintains the freely
96   redistributable termcap/terminfo entries.  They can be downloaded
97   from http://www.ccil.org/~esr/ncurses.html, or you can contact him
98   at esr@snark.thyrsus.com.
99
100Q: The entire screen repaints on every keystroke!
101A: Your system's curses implementation is broken.  You should use the
102   curses implementation provided with vi or a curses replacement such
103   as ncurses.  Eric Raymond is one of the maintainers of the freely
104   redistributable ncurses package.  You can download ncurses from
105   http://www.ccil.org/~esr/ncurses.html, or you can contact him at
106   esr@snark.thyrsus.com.
107
108Q: When I use vi on a Sun console (terminal type sun-34) the screen
109   is occasionally trashed, usually when exiting vi!
110A: The Sun console can't handle the 'al' capability of the termcap
111   entry (the il1 capability of terminfo entries).  If you delete that
112   entry from your terminfo/termcap information everything should work
113   correctly.
114
115Q: I don't have a version of ctags (or I have ctags, but it doesn't tag
116   nearly enough things)!
117A: There's a version of ctags available on the 4.4BSD-Lite distributions,
118   as well as the FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux and GNU distributions.  Or, you
119   might want to try Exuberant Ctags:
120
121	Title:		Exuberant Ctags
122	Version:	1.3
123	Entered-date:	16JUN96
124	Description:
125	    A better ctags which generates tags for all possible tag types:
126	    macro definitions, enumerated values (values inside enum{...}),
127	    function and method definitions, enum/struct/union tags, external
128	    function prototypes (optional), typedefs, and variable
129	    declarations. It is far less easily fooled by code containing #if
130	    preprocessor conditional constructs, using a conditional path
131	    selection algorithm to resolve complicated choices, and a
132	    fall-back algorithm when this one fails. Can also be used to print
133	    out a list of selected objects found in source files.
134	Keywords:	ctags, tags, exuberant
135	Author:		darren@sirsi.com (Darren Hiebert)
136			darren@hiwaay.net (Darren Hiebert)
137	Maintained-by:	darren@sirsi.com (Darren Hiebert)
138			darren@hiwaay.net (Darren Hiebert)
139	Primary-site:	sunsite.unc.edu /pub/Linux/devel/lang/c
140			27kB ctags-1.3.tar.gz
141	Alternate-site:	ftp.halcyon.com /local/gvr
142			27kB ctags-1.3.tar.gz
143	Original-site:
144	Platforms:	UNIX, MSDOS, WindowsNT, Windows95, OS/2, Amiga
145	Copying-policy:	Public domain
146
147Q: When I update a file I already have open, and use :e to reread it, I
148   get nul's for the rest of the file!
149A: Your system's implementation of mmap(2) has a bug; you will have to
150   exit vi and re-execute it.
151
152Q: Where can I get cscope?
153A: Cscope is available on UNIXWare System V Release 4.0 variants such as
154   Sun Solaris 2.x (/opt/SUNWspro/bin) and UNIXWare System V Release 4.1.
155
156   You can buy version 13.3 source with an unrestricted license for $400
157   from AT&T Software Solutions by calling +1-800-462-8146.  Binary
158   redistribution of cscope is an additional $1500, one-time flat fee.
159
160   For more information, see http://www.unipress.com/att/new/cscope.html.
161