Folks,
After almost two years, I may have stumbled onto the root cause of this vi
display corruption problem.
It looks to be related to the character encoding difference between the Linux
system that uses UTF-8, and macOS (XQuartz) (X11) which apparently uses
something else.
I solved this problem by starting my xterm sessions on macOS with this xterm
command option:
-en UTF-8
and removed all other work-arounds on macOS and the Linux systems.
Now the vi edit display on macOS is no longer corrupted.
The key seems to be the the encoding difference seen on macOS as:
Riegner-iMac3:HPE dick$ locale
LANG=
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_ALL=
And that on one of our typical Linux systems:
linux-pu89:/dickie/text/$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
The root cause seems to be the extended non-ASCII characters in the text file.
This solution does not handle all the extended non-ASCII characters exactly the
same on macOS and Linux.
For example, on my local Linux xterm, the Linux vi shows the correct text for
the local file:
491 If it's not logged in, then login as:
But on my macOS xterm, looking remotely at the same file on Linux, the Linux vi
shows that the quote is missing; so vi displaying from Linux back to macOS is
close, but not exact:
491 If it s not logged in, then login as:
I copied the Linux file locally to macOS and used the macOS version of vi to display the
non-ASCII characters as hex using "set display=uhex":
491 If it <80><99>s not logged in, then login as:
So there are definitely extended non-ASCII characters in this text file
contributing to the macOS, Linux, and vi confusion.
Another option is to set the macOS locale environment variables, but I do not
know what side-effects and problems that may cause. So I am going with this
macOS (XQuartz) (X11) solution:
xterm -en UTF-8
None of the vi display corruption is seen using the macOS Terminal application.
This sure looks to be a macOS (XQuartz) (X11) issue, but vi is
front-and-center when the display corruption is seen.
I hope this solution turns out to be solid and helps other vi users running
XQuartz on macOS.
--
Dick Riegner
[email protected]
--
I consistently see text display corruption when
editing a file on a remote Linux system with vim.
I run an xterm window on macOS and ssh into a
remote Linux machine. The edit session is
displayed back to an XQuartz server running on
the same macOS.
I have only seen this problem when displaying
back to an XQuartz server running on macOS.
I have not seen the problem when displaying back
to an X11 server running on various Linux
systems.
This problem occurs with newer versions of vim,
but not older versions.
Inserting lines causes the INSERT message to be
displayed in the command line, but it is not
cleared after hitting the ESC key.
Inserting text also causes extraneous lines of
text to be added to the body of the original
text, corrupting the edit display.
I suspect that I am seeing the same vim behavior
as was reported in this incident:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vim_dev/GR9YG8TZy6o
A work-around is to add this statement to the
.vimrc file:
set ambiwidth=single
I do not know if this is a bug in vim, XQuartz,
or both. So I am asking for vim help here and
XQuartz help in another forum.
Here is a summary of editing a file using two
versions of vim, each with and without, the
ambiwidth work-around.
New Vim
-------
VIM - Vi IMproved 7.4 (2013 Aug 10)
Included patches: 1-207, 209-326
Compiled by 'http://www.opensuse.org/'
Works with: set ambiwidth=single
Fails without: set ambiwidth=single
Old Vim
-------
VIM - Vi IMproved 7.2 (2008 Aug 9, compiled Feb 4 2012 09:50:29)
Included patches: 1-108
Compiled by 'http://www.opensuse.org/'
Works with: set ambiwidth=single
Works without: set ambiwidth=single
--
Dick Riegner
--
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