Vim shows somewhat broken representation but the actual output to file is correct, terminal issue?
 

My Vim has recently started acting strange.

I open a new file in Vim as a normal user, and the bottom line shows all normal. I then press 'I' (for insert mode) and the bottom line shows all normal. Now, when I press the first (any) key to insert a character the cursor seems to first be jumping down a line before it inserts the character. At the bottom line (statusline) I now get 2 lines. If I just ignore that fact that it automatically seems to do a CR or LF and enter whatever characters/text I want and save the file, the actual output to the file seems to be correct (no extra CR or LF). From what I can think of it seems like some kind of "render" issue.

This happens when I run vim inside rxvt as well as xterm in openbox as a normal user.
It does not happen if I run 'sudo vim' or 'su - root' and then 'vim'.
It does not happen if I run it from another non-graphic tty, like tty3 as a normal user.
I'm running bash as the shell but I also tried switching to sh but the issue is the same.

Since vim seems to work fine outside of X I believe the issue is not with vim itself but rather some terminal settings that may have changed or similarly.

Any ideas that could potentially point me in the right direction is much appreciated :)

It sounds like it might be referencing a different. '.vimrc' file ?
(Incidentally, a leading dot makes the file hidden to 'ls' - use 'ls -a' )

I'd at least start by checking the PATH in each case to see exactly which copy of vim it's referencing.

HTH

Thanks for the quick reply.

Running echo $PATH:
As normal user inside rxvt in openbox 'echo $PATH':
As normal user inside rxvt in openbox 'sudo echo $PATH':
As normal user inside rxvt in openbox 'su - root' then 'echo $PATH':
'echo $PATH' yield the same results running in tty3.

I searched for all .vimrc files ('find / -name "*.vimrc") in the system found only the one inside the user homedir with the following content:
EDIT: I renamed .vimrc 'mv .vimrc dot.vimrc.bak' and it did no difference.

Well, there can be multiple '.vimrc' and also system level 'vimrc' files - note no leading 'dot' for the system level ones.
This page shows how to find them https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...ing-vimrc-file

Also, within each env, run
to see where it's getting the prog from.
Note that one of them could easily be eg a shell script that does something funky, then calls vim on your behalf.



Basically, assume nothing(!); check all cfgs and vim 'programs' in each env.

;)


HTH

vim does not depend on X, it does not use any X related settings (that is gvim).
From the other hand vim uses a lot of terminal commands (like cursor movement, scroll, .....). All these commands depend on the type of the terminal. vim tries to detect it (to identify the available commands) and also you can set TERM, but anyway, if it is not set properly it may cause issues like that.
Basically, opening a terminal emulator will set this TERM variable, which should work, but can be overridden.

points to the binary file /usr/bin/vim in all environments.

I also did a search for vimrc-files with which gave me two results; /home/user/.vimrc and /usr/share/vim/vimrc. I am still not sure that the issue is in any of those files since I would guess /usr/share/vim/vimrc is loaded by all users or at least users that don't have their own .vimrc. In my case the root user doesn't have its own .vimrc so I would assume that it is using /usr/share/vim/vimrc. Also the reason I don't think there is an issue with /home/user/.vimrc is that there are no issues when running vim as the user from a ttyX outside of Openbox/X.

What yields
echo $TERM
inside and outside of Openbox?

In rxvt inside Openbox, logged in as user:
In tty3 outside Openbox, logged in as user:
In tty3 outside Openbox, logged in as root:

see the last post here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/9209...nside-a-script (and the link)

Maybe a problem with TERM=rxvt

Try to start vim with another TERM environment.
Command line (in a rxvt):
And another one:

After reading pan64's link and trying out
I've made some progress.
When running
the issue seems to be gone. So why is it working when running as root while TERM=rxvt but not as the user when TERM=rxvt? Are there some settings that are being applied with 'rxvt' on a per user basis somewhere that might have gone rogue?
I feel like we're going in the right direction :)

would be nice to explain all the details. Is it a console, a terminal emulator, or what? How did you enter into it?

I'm running vim inside a terminal emulator 'rxvt' window in Openbox.

I guess there is something wrong in your /usr/share/terminfo/r/rxvt (binary terminfo file compiled by tic).
(Well, another reason could be a bad rxvt entry in the legacy /etc/termcap (text file).)

You can try to set TERM to other rxvt variants in /usr/share/terminfo/r/

Command to list all terminal types along with a short description:

/usr/share/terminfo/r/rxvt does not exist but rxvt-unicode and rxvt-unicode-256color does and they are the only files in that directory.
/etc/termcap does not exist on my system. Unfortunatly 'toe' does not exist either since this is a pretty minimalistic system.
Inside /usr/share/terminfo there only exist the directory 'r' which contains the two binaries mentioned above.

Running or both yields vim with the issue.