So my prof asked us to download Putty to be able to access the schools servers from home.

It is just a basic command prompt etc. But it isn't as pretty as the interface on campus.

Is there a better program for VI with a better interface? Or is putty the way to go?


my big complaint is that it doesn't appear to sentence or word wrap, so stuff gets cut off really awkwardly

This post was edited by Eep on Jun 12 2012 11:48pm

Putty is actually a pretty good SSH client. In my experience, VIM does line breaking just fine (maybe it's already part of my vimrc *shrug*).

If you like, I could upload the .vimrc file that I use. I inherited it from a grad student who mentored me when I was doing undergraduate research lab in college, and it's served me well for many years.

that would seem to fix it

However, I don't quite understand how to make the settings permanent. I know it says to do something, but I am unaware of what it entails.

As I mentioned above, put it in your .vimrc.

Yeah I didn't know what you were talking about until today (now I know)

anyways, we don't use VIM, we specifically use the sub one called vi.

But yeah, I figured it out now and it's great.

Only question: did the link carte posted work with vi and not vim?

Like if I put those lines in my .cshrc

This post was edited by Eep on Jun 13 2012 11:19pm

On most systems now a days vi is an alias for vim you sure you are actually using vi? (Just throwing it out there but I doubt you would make that mistake)

I asked my professor about it today, and he told me that we were NOT using vim

This post was edited by Eep on Jun 14 2012 12:02am

ah k

I dunno, I regularly use vi as well to debug machines that don't have vim on them. It's annoying not to have some features of vim, but word wrapping was never an issue.

Are you sure it's not just the shell program you're using?

edit: Actually, maybe I see what you mean. You're annoyed that it's not wrapping entire words, so you see something like this



That's kind of just par for the course when using very limited editors (which vi is, for all its merits; but so is practically every other super-simplistic unix editor out there). You could in theory make this less likely to happen by widening your shell window before opening vi.

This post was edited by irimi on Jun 14 2012 12:06pm