Rubenerd

I had this weird Vim bug on a couple of FreeBSD box I maintain. The last line would always be partially clobbered with these characters when opening a file, or would be added to a new buffer:

$q q

I briefly thought it was writing and duping :q to the file, instead of interpreting it, but hitting ZZ like a certain musical fan did the same thing. Pro tip: They’re pronounced Zed-Zed Top. It clearly wasn’t the case though; it had no ill effects on config files, and cat didn’t show them. So it looked like a rendering issue.

Not to get all 43 Folders on you, but turns out it was specific issue with using Terminal.app on macOS to access specific versions of Vim. This bug on GitHub suggests its Terminal.app’s fault for advertising itself as xterm in $TERM; a common practice among terminal emulators, but not strictly true. If so, it’s curious it didn’t manifest before.

In any case, there’s a mitigation in place in the most recent versions. So upgrade and be done!

The second curiosity came from trying to upgrade vim. I used vim-lite on headless servers, so I don’t pull in Xorg or GTK dependencies. But when I went to upgrade it:

# pkg upgrade vim-lite
==> pkg: No packages available to upgrade matching
==> 'vim-lite' have been found in the repositories

Weird! Checking all available vim ports:

# pkg search vim
==> [..]
==> vim-8.0.1769
==> vim-console-8.0.1769
==> vim-tiny-8.0.1769
==> [..]

Checking vim-console in Freshports, the tireless maintainer adamw@ committed this change on the 11th of January:

Rename editors/vim-lite to editors/vim-console. The vim-console port isn’t the main vim port. The only difference is lack of gtk20 GUI, and the language bindings are off by default.

Makes sense. So now we can upgrade:

# pkg remove vim-lite
# pkg install vim-console

And now I’ve banished $q q! I shouldn’t be this happy about this.