Mapping in vimrc causes bizarre arrow behaviour

Question

I am a happy VIM user, although I admit I\'m quite far from being fluent. I found this nice post: Vim clear last search highlighting and I thought I\'d become a better perso

Answer 1

The mapping

nnoremap  :noh

will conflict with so called "grey keys" and I believe that it should be used either in GVim only or in terminal Vim by someone who does not use special keys like arrows.

From what I know (and guess) how Vim processes keys, I would say that it's impossible to do anything with this. For Vim to recognize special key all its components should go in a row, so when you press Arrow Left Vim gets the following sequence of codes:

[ D

But after your mapping Arrow Left becomes:

: n o h l

[ D

Vim sees two separate sequences and treats as a single press of Escape key, thus next two codes of Left Arrow key lose their special meaning.

So I suggest you to map :noh to some other key sequence (e.g. to one starting with , see :help mapleader; I don't recommend you to use F-keys, using them is as bad as using of arrow keys).