vipc PC-specific set options to Vi	Miscellaneous Information
	SPECIAL KEYS SET OPTION VARIABLES   Non-Printable Characters SEE ALSO

---

SPECIAL KEYS

Vi recognizes as the left hand side of the map and map! statements single keystrokes which are not ASCII characters. Such keystrokes are represented by a keyword whose first character is #. They are transmitted by a key but do not necessarily have any ASCII equivalent.

Table 1: Mapping Non-ASCII Characters in vi

---

SET OPTION VARIABLES

The following list contains PC-specific details about set option variables. If the variable is prefixed with no, it defaults to off. Default values are shown after =. The minimal abbreviation is shown after the comma.

attrib=0x07000000

This allows every character on the screen to be displayed in a non-normal attribute. This attribute value is or'ed into each character cell on the screen. Normally the least significant byte of each cell is the character and the most significant byte is the attribute. The default is to make each cell the normal white on black. To make your screen inverse video, set attrib to 0x7000. See your display adaptor manual for a full listing of the attributes available.

Listed here are some common values for VGA adaptors:

0x8000  Background intensity
0x4000  Background red
0x2000  Background green
0x1000  Background blue

0x0800  Foreground intensity or bold
0x0400  Foreground red
0x0200  Foreground green
0x0100  Foreground blue

cursor=0x0B0C0000

This lets you display a different cursor than the default. The number specified is actually two bytes, specifying the start and stop lines for the cursor. The most significant byte is the starting scan line for the cursor; the least significant byte is the ending scan line. Scan lines are counted downwards from the top of the character. 0x0B0C, the default, thus decodes into eleventh through twelfth scanlines. On the color adaptor, the default for this value is 0x0607 or the sixth and seventh scan lines.

These defaults are set by requesting BIOS to report the current cursor scan lines in use. Thus, if you are running with some other cursor, Vi continues to use that cursor.

The cursor variable sets the cursor size to percentage of the character height. For example,

set cursor=50

would set the cursor size to 50% of a character position.

cursorins=0x090D0000

This lets you display a different cursor than the default when in insert mode. It is specified in the same manner as for the cursor set option. The default value causes a half-cell sized block cursor covering scanlines 9 through 13. On the color adaptor, the default is 0x0408 for scan lines 4 through 8.

The cursorins variable sets the cursor size to a percentage of the character height. For example,

set cursorin=30

would set the cursor size to 30% of a character position.

errattrib=0x70000000

This lets you set the attributes associated with an error message. The default is inverse video.

nonative

When this option is on, Vi uses the device's own character set to display characters that are normally unprintable. See the section on Non-Printable Characters.

shelliopt=-i

When you type a ! command, vi uses the chosen shell to run a single command, and informs this shell to run non-interactively if possible. The default value of this variable depends upon the value of the SHELL environment variable. If you've set SHELL, then the default value for shelliopt is -i.

shellopt=-c

When you type a ! command, vi uses the chosen shell to run a single command. To accomplish this, it invokes the shell with an option that runs a specified command and exits. For MKS KornShell, this is -c. If the name of the shell (set by the shell variable) was taken from the SHELL environment variable, then shellopt defaults to -c.

tosscr

On PCs, line delimiters are generally RETURN-NEWLINE. Under most other systems (including UNIX and POSIX systems), they are simply NEWLINE. Therefore Vi deletes all RETURN characters followed by a NEWLINE upon input (RETURN characters not followed by a NEWLINE are passed through), and inserts a single RETURN before each NEWLINE upon output. If tosscr is set off, RETURN is treated like any other character, and normal files show up with ^M on the end of each line.

Non-Printable Characters

By default non-printable characters with values greater than 0x7F are displayed as a caret (^) followed by two hex digits indicating their value. These characters may be generated through the keyboard by using any of the KEYBxx commands, or by holding the ALT key and typing a decimal number on the keypad. Non-printable characters with values less than 0x80 are displayed as a caret (^) followed by the character representing the control character.

On the PC display, all characters are actually printable. Thus, we define non-printable characters as the control characters, and those from 0x7F and up that are not alphabetic letters. So, for example, 0x9E, being an accented E is considered printable, while 0xD0, being a box drawing character, is considered non-printable.

Setting the native variable displays all unprintable characters in the device's own character set. Thus non-ASCII and control characters are shown on the PC display as accented characters, currency symbols, and other special characters such as happy faces and musical notes.

---

SEE ALSO

Commands:

vi

Miscellaneous:

envvar