cygwin + mintty + vim backspace problem

Question

I have installed vim, mintty via cywin on XP. The problem is when I try to hit backspace in VIM edit mode, the cursor move back a character instead of wiping the previous char. How can I tweak this odd behavior?

Answer 1

Add

set backspace=indent,eol,start

to your .vimrc file.

Answer 2

Cygwin's vim is configured to behave like traditional vi by default. Just create an empty ~/.vimrc, which causes vim extensions to be enabled and hence the Backspace and arrow keys to behave as expected.

Answer 3

Have this same problem with mintty and msys2 by default.

You can just copy the example vimrc config file to your home directory as .vimrc and it fixes everything. It will also enable all the fancy vim features such as syntax highlighting.

cp -vi /usr/share/vim/vim74/vimrc_example.vim ~/.vimrc