my up and down arrows don't work in vim

Question

I just bought a new Macbook Air and my up and down arrows don't work in vim. They work in the bash shell however. But if I try to use them in Vim, I just get the bell.

After more experimentation, I think some vim ruby plugin is messing up my arrow keys.

Answer 1

I've notice that you said: (before you edit the question in Stackoverflow)

I need the arrows for FuzzyFinder and for going back in my Vim command search history.

You can achieve the same with the <C-n> and <C-p> key combinations, but you probably need also these in your .vimrc:

cnoremap <C-b> <Left>
cnoremap <C-f> <Right>
cnoremap <M-b> <S-Left>
cnoremap <M-f> <S-Right>

so you can have the arrows emulation in command mode (search included).

Answer 2

You are likely running Vim in vi compatible mode, which uses h, j, k and l for cursor navigation. Try typing the following command in Vim's command mode:

:set nocompatible

If this fixes your problem, you can create a file called .vimrc in your home directory (if it doesn't exist already) and add this line to the file:

set nocompatible

Answer 3

You could always use j to move down and k to move up...

Answer 4

Try running vim as:

vim -u NONE --noplugin

to prevent any scripts or plugins changing anything, then see if your cursor keys work.
If there's still a problem, it's not caused by your Vim setup.

Answer 5

Look in the Vim FAQ for "mapping".