debian-accessibility needs to hear about this problem. -- Jude <jdashiel at panix dot com> "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." Ed Howdershelt 1940. On Thu, 21 Mar 2024, Martin McCormick wrote: > After an upgrade to debian bookworm, things were working well in > the command-line mode until I ran crontab -e to edit a crontab > file. > > I've been using the vi editor in unix since 1989 so I'm > used to how it works under the command line and it has always > been surprisingly accessible even under very austere conditions > so I thought nothing about selecting vim as the editor in the > crontab app and then I tried to use it. > > I'm not even sure what it is that gets turned on when > using crontab -e because up to now, it has always just ben like > any ASCII text document. > > Now, the arrow keys do let one step through a line of > text but the j, k, h and l keys uselessly let us hear cursor > positions and not even that fully. We just hear 1 2 3 4, etc as > we move to the right with no feedback at all that identifies what > characters we are passing over. > > If one presses the carriage return, we uselessly hear > more advancing digits and, if we insert characters, we uselessly > hear things like 1,2 1,3 and so on with not a hint as to what we > just typed. This is totally unusable and I don't even know what > mode is turned on when running crontab -e which used to just run > vi on the crontab for one's shell with good feedback. > > If I run a command like > > vi SOMEFILE, I get perfectly normal behavior on somefile and can > edit to my heart's content. When I tried to run the botched form > of crontab, I ended up somehow joining some lines together and > didn't know it until a cronjob failed with odd errors and I > simply ran crontab -l >newfile and then ran vi on that and all > was clear and obvious so, if I can figure out how to lose > whatever that mode is that crontab -e turns on, I will be happy > once again. I suspect that the text characters are immediately > being followed by those darned cursor coordinates such that the > last thing sent is what we hear but whatever it is, I have heard > the same junk output I got once when I accidentally got nano > started on a document some years ago and couldn't get out of nano > fast enough. The only useful thing I found about nano was that > ctrl-x triggers the prompt to save everything or not and I answer > no and make sure vi runs next time. Another strategy might be to > turn off speech while typing and lose all feedback but that is > extreme to say the least. > > Thanks for any and all constructive suggestions. > > Martin > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to blinux-list+unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxx.