Date: Wed, 01 Jan 2020 15:44:02 -0800 From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@tristatelogic.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Substituting horizontal tab characters in vi Message-ID: <61189.1577922242@segfault.tristatelogic.com>
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Yes, I'm a holdout. After all these years I still use vi. Why not? It works! But ever since "upgraded" to 12.0-RELEASE (from 9.1) I have been hitting my head on one annoying little problem with vi, and I wonder if anyone can tell me what the fix or workaround is. Quiet simply, it used to be possible to use vi to make substitutions for horizontal tab characters, say for example in the current line, by just typing : (colon) to get to the vi "command prompt" and then typing "s" (substitute command) followed by some delimiter, e.g. forward slash, and then just hitting the tab key on my keyboard, followed by a closing delimiter and then my substitution text followed by yet another closing delimiter. Now this doesn't work anymore. Now, vi, while in "command mode" won't even allow me to hit the tab key anymore! It just sits there and blinks at me as if I hadn't touched the keyboard at all. Funny thing though, I just now checked and realized that I *can* still get it to perform substitutions for horizontal tab characters, but I have to go through some rather silly gyrations in order to even enter the horizontal tab character. Specifically, I have to type in cntrl-v followed by cntrl-i. So anyway, is there some way of restoring the old behavior so that I can go back to just using the tab key in a straiightforward and intutive fashion? Regards, rfg P.S. This is not a big problem, but I really do wish that people wouldn't break standard tools like vi as they are "upgrading" them.
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