Local echo is making remote Vim hard to use

[songyang-dev]

The recently release local feature is nice to use on ssh terminals. But when editing files on the remote server with Vim, the cursor flickers around and seeing the edit of the text in real time becomes difficult. It would be nice if the local echoing is disabled when doing Vim and things similar to it.

Version: 1.51.0 (user setup)
Commit: fcac248
Date: 2020-11-05T18:18:23.642Z
Electron: 9.3.3
Chrome: 83.0.4103.122
Node.js: 12.14.1
V8: 8.3.110.13-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.19041

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Connect to a remote ssh server with a slight latency (ping=100ms)
2. Launch the file editor Vim on an existing file.
3. Try to type and edit the file

Does this issue occur when all extensions are disabled?: Yes/No

[Tyriar]

@connor4312 do we not switch off local echo when the alt buffer is active currently? I don't see Terminal.buffer.onBufferChange getting used so that's probably the easy fix here. Let's consider for November.

[connor4312]

We do, but on Windows/through powershell Vim doesn't seem to use the alternate buffer. Maybe there's another heuristic we can use to detect it though

[Tyriar]

Maybe using ITerminalService.onInstanceTitleChanged and disable it for vim/tmux/vi/etc. as a workaround? More specifically we'd want process title since the title also would include renaming the terminal, but there isn't an event for this currently.

[connor4312]

It looks like that doesn't work on git bash or through running bash in an existing powershell instance, because the terminal title change doesn't fire there. But it works on vim installed in windows via choco, so it's an improvement. I'll add it.

[github-actions]

This bug has been fixed in to the latest release of VS Code Insiders!

@XsongyangX, you can help us out by confirming things are working as expected in the latest Insiders release. If things look good, please leave a comment with the text /verified to let us know. If not, please ensure you're on version f4187f2 of Insiders (today's or later - you can use Help: About in the command palette to check), and leave a comment letting us know what isn't working as expected.

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