Solved - it had nothing to do with the Esc key. It was the colon key that had been mapped to Shift + "ö" on my keyboard. I'll let the text stand since it has already been posted.

Hi all,

When I type the Escape key and the colon in vi, I cannot reach the command line, so nothing can be edited.

I have installed ttylinux in virtualbox and mounted the resulting vdi image on my Linux (wrote a guide on how do that here, if anyone is interested).

I followed the ttylinux documentation and generated a keyboard map by running bin/dumpkmap and redirecting its output to etc/i18n/kmap, while the file system being mounted on my Ubuntu host. The same problem persisted before and after that.

However, the keyboard is still US mapped (I am using a Swedish layout).

I am not a regular vi user, but surely after having typed "i" to insert some text, hitting "Esc" then ":" should get me to the vi command mode for saving and quitting? It does on my Ubuntu host. Currently I have to reboot the virtual machine since I get stuck in vi and I can't edit or change anything.

I managed to get Internet connection on it by editing the relevant files while having the file system mounted on the host. So any help on the key mapping problem, or just let me know how to get nano on board, would be appreciated.

Hitting Esc seems to indent the text in vi once, then nothing happens.

Edit: Hitting Esc + "." in the shell brings upp the last command's last argument so Esc seems to work fine in the shell.

Last edited by jeorgen (2011-12-13 07:14:06)