ML Starkey's Weblog: Service with a smile!
Providing Technical Support to Sun's customers and other topics

System administration requires vi; if you do any sort of Unix support, you had better know at least the basics. Just not the usage basics, but the environmental basics. That is why this slashdot.org entry caught my eye.

I was interested in knowing specifically if Bill Joy had written vi for use with the common vt100 terminal type. That is what I had been told when I was trained to do serial port/terminal type support. "Why is vi not working correctly?" was an FAQ. The answer always was "check that vt100 is your termtype". The obvious followup question is "why vt100?". The answer we got in training was "because that's the termtype that Bill Joy used to write vi". I ran into this myself recently when accessing the remote console of a Sun Fire X4100 from my Sun Ray using gnome. TERM=vt100; export TERM does the trick.

From the mentions in the linked slashdot articles, I'd say that perhaps it was the other way around: the vt100 termtype was written to accomodate the env that Bill had way back when. Either way, it's true. If vi is acting flakey, especially when used from alternative windowing environments like Sun JDS/Gnome, set your $TERM to vt100.