vim.exe on windowsXP, alt-key combinations don't work

Question

For various reasons, I was stuck using vim.exe instead of gvim.exe on windows recently.

One of the only irritating aspects of this was that the alt-key did not work. (Mouse didn't work for scrolling either). When I tried to use alt-up (arrow), I got an 'I'-like character inserted instead of my chosen mapping.

'ga' lists it as 206, Hex 00ce, Octal 316.

Any idea what this is or how to fix this?

(vim 7.3, windows xp)

Answer 1

AFAIK, gvim is the only solution to your problems.

Answer 2

Although it's not a perfect workaround, you can probably map that "'I'-like" character. For example:

:nmap control+v,alt+up :echo "Alt-Up pressed."<CR>

In this example, you press control+v then alt+up, rather than typing those strings literally. This mapping will only work in normal mode, but you can map in other modes, such as insert, by using ":imap" instead.

When you put this mapping in your .vimrc, I recommend surrounding it by a conditional so it only gets defined when starting a non-GUI Vim under Windows:

if has('win32') && ! has('gui_running')
    nmap ...
endif