Lets face it. If you rely on vim locally, vim remotely on non debian based systems, and vim remotely on Debian based systems. ESPECIALLY in an environment where you don’t get to put in your own .vimrc (such as when logged in as root, and other people log in as root as well.) You’re pretty much screwed. Now I tried all the hacks. The custom strings in preferences. I tried replacement terminals (terminator, iterm, and one or two others) And I could get things to work locally but not remotely, or remotely but not locally… So… I… Well… I gave up. I:

• Installed X11 from my Install DVD
• Ran X11Update2006.pkg
• Launched X11
• Selected Applications –> Customize Menu
• Changed my “Terminal” command to “xterm -fa Monaco -fs 12 -bg black -fg grey -sb -sl 99999 -cr green -bc”
• symlinked my .profile to .bashrc

And… “the dishes are done, dude” This takes care of *basically* everything.. with two minor exceptions… forward delete doesn’t work well on the command line, and pasting is somewhat awkward. but everything else… home, end, pgup, pgdn, l,r,u,d, all work everywhere I’ve tried so far. I can put up with some things to work around… as long as they are consistent things to ALWAYS work around… not things that work one way here, another over there, and differently in a third place… That bites.

And in case you’re curious… here’s my .profile (.bashrc)… without all the personal aliases…

function tranquil_thoughts_prompt
{
local WHITE="\[\033[1;37m\]"
local BRIGHTGREEN="\[\033[1;32m\]"
local GREEN="\[\033[0;32m\]"
local CYAN="\[\033[0;36m\]"
local GRAY="\[\033[0;37m\]"
local BRIGHTCYAN="\[\033[1;36m\]"
export PS1="${GRAY}.o${WHITE}O(${BRIGHTCYAN}\u${GRAY}@${BRIGHTGREEN}\H ${CYAN}\w${WHITE})${GRAY} "
}

export EDITOR="vim";
export PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${USER}@localhost - ${PWD}\007"'
tranquil_thoughts_prompt
export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin:~/bin

(The export PS1 line above is all one line from export to } “