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I have installed vim, mintty via cywin on XP. The problem is when I try to hit backspace in VIM edit mode, the cursor move back a character instead of wiping the previous char. How can I tweak this odd behavior?

quack quixote
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overboming
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3 Answers3

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Add

set backspace=indent,eol,start

to your .vimrc file.

Bartek Banachewicz
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    **this** was infact the solution. **not** creating an empty $HOME/.vimrc file. Thanks – Felipe Alvarez Apr 06 '11 at 02:39
  • Wiki link, explaining the situation - http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Erasing_previously_entered_characters_in_insert_mode – Temikus Apr 05 '13 at 07:28
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    The empty .vimrc worked for my friend today. I do not have an empty .vimrc, but I also do not have the backspace settings you indicate above, and it works for me. I believe this indicates that for mintty, the empty .vimrc IS the solution. Or in other words, by having any .vimrc at all, the default settings are changed and in fact fix this issue (unless you .vimrc explicitly overrides them, of course). – Dan Apr 18 '13 at 23:30
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Cygwin's vim is configured to behave like traditional vi by default. Just create an empty ~/.vimrc, which causes vim extensions to be enabled and hence the Backspace and arrow keys to behave as expected.

ak2
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0

Have this same problem with mintty and msys2 by default.

You can just copy the example vimrc config file to your home directory as .vimrc and it fixes everything. It will also enable all the fancy vim features such as syntax highlighting.

cp -vi /usr/share/vim/vim74/vimrc_example.vim ~/.vimrc
Dev
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