Pressing ESC need one second to switch mode in tmux or screen

[bigeagle]

Hi,
With version c48f835, when nvim runs inside tmux or screen, pressing ESC needs more than one second to switch mode. If you type ESC and press a key quickly, there appears some latin-1 characters in ther terminal. For example, when in insert mode, and i wanna switch to normal mode and switch back, so i type esc i, then an é was inserted.

Cheers,
Justin

[bigeagle]

By setting set -sg escape-time 0 in .tmux.conf can work around this problem.

[tarruda]

@bigeagle what escape-time value were you using before?

[bigeagle]

It's the default value, I'm not sure but I believe it's near 1 second.

[bigeagle]

The default value is 500 milliseconds

[tarruda]

Nvim now uses libtermkey for parsing keys, that means alt key combinations are detected by default. So, if you have a 500 ms escape time and press esc+i, tmux will immediately send ^[i which is interpreted by libtermkey as alt+i.

Vim does not detect alt combinations in terminals by default(source), so when it receives ^[i which doesn't match any terminfo key sequence, it will parse as the keys esc and i separately.

If you want to avoid this kind of problem, use a low escape-time value(I dont recommend 0), personally I use 10 milliseconds.

[bigeagle]

Older versions without libtermkey works, there is a delay of mode switching but key sequence is still right (esc i would not be alt-i). Maybe we need a patch for libtermkey?

Setting escape-time is fine but at those who use default conf would be confused.

Cheers,

[tarruda]

Maybe we need a patch for libtermkey?

libtermkey is working correctly, esc+i is just how most terminals represent alt + i. The difference is that alt is now recognized automatically.(The old method doesn't work anymore, you cant use set <a-i> ^[i for example).

It would be good if the library had the option to disable alt recognition though(cc @leonerd)

[mxaddict]

I had a similar issue with this and I had a really hard time finding this issue that explained what was the cause and the FIX, I would suggest we add this as a known issue somewhere easy to find? maybe readme? or wiki?

NOT for me (I already fixed it of-course), but I think it would help future tmux + vim users that switch to NVIM 😈

[justinmk]

@mxaddict Added to list of sanity checks #1202

[mxaddict]

Nice 👍

[justincampbell]

I ran into this, and just assumed it was a bug in Neovim since it started happening right after upgrading. I had switched backed to vanilla Vim, thinking I would try Neovim again after this is fixed.

Then, @iamjarvo pointed me to this issue. I'm not sure how I would have found this otherwise, including buried in a README or elsewhere. Maybe a post-install message?

[felipecrv]

I ran into this. I press ESC more than I should (paranoid), so everything seemed broken to me.