I want to use vi when running adb shell. Starting "vi" is easy. However, I found that the ESC key doesn't seem to get through to it, so I can't exit insert mode.
More broadly, it doesn't appear that I'm able to send an ESC character to the adb shell at all. I've scanned the web pretty thoroughly and haven't been able to find anyone with a similar problem (much less an answer).
I'm running VRUFNK1 on a Samsung S4. On the PC end I'm running the "adb shell" command from Cygwin under Windows.
Ideas???
UPDATE: Here's are some possible clues.
- The adb shell doesn't seem to be the problem. I can capture ESC in a file running
od -cb > file, so ESC seems to be getting to the program being run under the adb shell. - All commands get echoed in my "adb shell" (as if set -v was on, but it isn't).
- I notice that input doesn't seem to get sent to adb shell from my cygwin shell in "raw mode" -- i.e., any text I type gets buffered locally until I hit carriage return -- then the entire line gets sent. I'm not sure why that would make ESC ineffective, but certainly vi doesn't expect to be receiving input in quite that manner and perhaps its an indication of something unusual in my environment.
Similar to #1, bash (Bash X) seems to receive it, although echoing from bash is very strange. I can use ESC to enter "edit mode" in my bash shell (Bash X) to scroll through my history (I've run set -o vi), but the experience is very strange. When I hit ESC,k, nothing changes on the screen but my location in the command history goes up one rung (as it should); subsequent presses of 'k' cause a 'k' to be echoed to the screen (instead of the relevant command from my history list). When I finally hit carriage return, the correct command from my history list is executed (!).
UPDATE 2: Progress…
I tried setting the stty value in the "adb shell" to the same as the ones in my cygwin bash shell and that didn't have any effect.
I also tried this: Avoiding escape timeout issues in vim but it didn't help.
- I tried this (by reading in from a file using
:so <filename>). - Unfortunately, the commands weren't recognized by "vi" (they are actually "vim" commands).
Partial Solution:
Typing a <cr> immediately after the ESC when in "vi" works -- the ESC is accepted and I can exit the editor. It's awkward, and the editing window is still unusable (as if TERM was set to the wrong value), but this is progress.
Also, things work fine when I ssh in. That shell gets started by the telnet server; similar situation as Terminal Emulator directly on the device. Ssh has its own server which then forks off the shell. In the case of the "adb shell", the shell is forked off by /sbin/adbd -- as far as I can tell, there is simply something unusual about that environment. This is a huge step for me -- at least now I have a way to do full screen editing on the device using my PC (rather than editing directly on the S4's tiny screen). Thanks to Jack Palevich for that suggestion.
I can only think of two things to try at this point:
- Try running adb shell against someone's device (but the device must be running root, so that I can run Busybox's "vi") (BTW, the version of "vi" is not the problem -- it runs fine from ssh.)
- As someone else to run "vi" in "adb shell" on my device, from their host (preferably someone who has succeeded in running "adb shell" and vi somewhere previously.
I'm starting to think that It Simply Doesn't Work.
UPDATE 3: Info from XDA Developers
I found some relevant posts on the XDA Developers forum. It seems to be the case that people have had problems with this for a long time (since at least 2010). I didn't find any solutions.
XDA Link 1
XDA Link 2
XDA Link 3
There is also a paragraph listing various perceived/proposed adb shell bugs that match my experience, here:
