Tag Archives: vim

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. Inside vim type :set term=xterm and that should do it Edit your .vimrc file (in your home directory) and add set term=xterm Before launching vim type export TERM=xterm to set an environmental variable Add that last command (export TERM=xterm) into one of your startup files like ‘~/.profileor ‘~/.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 … Continue reading →