So a mild annoyance I found once switching over to Ubuntu. When in insert or replace mode, your arrow keys will stop working. Hitting an arrow key will move you to the line above the one you’re on and start adding “D” letters on new lines, causing undue headache while trying to clean up the mess.

For those of you not in the know, I was once a die-hard gentoo fanatic. I recently converted to OSX back in february, and am happily coding along. For some of our development sandboxes, we’ve opted for Ubuntu. It’s stable, it’s sane, and doesn’t require you to compile everything from scratch to gain that oh-so-necessary 2% performance gain from not compiling in the Gnome dependencies into your kde-only environment.

(sarcasm: I has it).

Okay, so back to the matter at hand.. A lot of the time one needs to get into a system, modify a config file, and get out. VIM is almost always available on every system I’ve worked on, but for some reason the default VIM in Ubuntu has borked keyboard mappings.

Well, apparently there’s another version of vim one can install to fix this:

apt-get install vim-full

That’s it. All there is to it. Pretty clean, eh? 11 megs of .deb downloads later and your problems should be solved.

Now if anyone can explain to me why the full version of vim has Gnome dependencies, I’d be eternally grateful.

I guess there are some things gentoo IS good for.. like saving disk space.