Recently I installed Jailkit on `Ubuntu 12.04` and then tried to use the `vim` editor to edit files as the `jailed` user (specifically a user jailed with the `bash` shell) and `vim` was behaving oddly.
The colors on the terminal were just a gray (default color) and a bold white. After a little digging I found out this is how `vim` does syntax highlighting when it thinks that only two colors are available.
Also, I was having trouble with the arrow keys not working – I could move around with `HJKL` but there also seemed to be lag and `vim` was hanging or would hang sometimes and was not responsive.
I typed in `set terminal` and it told me `ansi` which is the default, “dumb” terminal. You can change `vim` to another terminal type, like `xterm` a few ways.
1. Inside `vim` type `:set term=xterm` and that should do it
2. Edit your `.vimrc` file (in your home directory) and add `set term=xterm`
3. Before launching `vim` type `export TERM=xterm` to set an environmental variable
4. Add that last command (`export TERM=xterm`) into one of your startup files like ‘~/.profile` or ‘~/.bashrc`
This fixed the issue with the arrow keys, the lag and hanging, but I still only had two colors. After many hours of digging I realized that with Jailkit on Ubuntu even if you do `jk_init -v /home/jail editors` to install `joe` and `vim` and `emacs` you still get this problem. I did a stack trace on `vim` and even turned on debugging and logging and still could not find the issue.
After realizing it was a terminal detection issue and looking though how Unix and Linux determine the terminal type I noticed, that at least on Ubuntu, the files it needs for that operation of terminal capability detection are in the `terminfo` directory at `/lib/terminfo/` – this may be a different directory on other distributions / flavors of linux – the directory should exist and have a lot of subdirectories and not be empty. Once you find the right directory you can copy it to inside the jail using the `jk_cp` command, so if your jail is in `/home/jail` you can use:
jk_cp -v -f /home/jail /lib/terminfo/
