mjhjmtu

I have only used vi on Debain 8 before and I was able to press "i" to add any text. Even delete was working fine. But now on Debian 9 it seems vi behaviour is different as pressing "i" nothing happens.

On Debian 8 when you press "i" then it says at the bottom "INSERT" which means now you can start changing text. On Debian 9 pressing "i" does nothing but if I press it twice then it shows one "i" and then I can write remaining text.

Right now I just want to change SSH port and for that I simply want to delete character "#" and change port 22 to something else but I can't even do this simple task now.

Is there a command tutorial available for vi on Debian 9?

Usually, on Debian 9, /usr/bin/vi is a symlink to vim or vim-tiny in version 8.0, while on Debian 8 it's been a symlink to version 7.4. Absolutely nothing has changed about the absolute basic commands like i or x. Even in readonly mode (option -R or started with command view) the commands work, just issuing a warning about changing a readonly file. Even the horrible "easy" mode (option -y) doesn't produce behaviour like you describe.

Bottom line: This is not caused by simply switching from Debian 8 to 9.

What to do:

• 
  type vi will tell you what you are actually executing, for example /usr/bin/vi
  


• 
  vi --version should tell you what you are really executing


• If it's really some vi or vim, you are using some really weird keybindings! Test whether it's local or global by trying as another user

Update after reading OP's comment:

"On Debian 9 pressing "i" does nothing but if I press it twice then it shows one "i" and then I can write remaining text.", so pressing i actually does something: it puts you in insert mode as before. You are just irritated because nothing is displayed in the last line. In this respect there should also not be any differences between Debian 8 and 9.

Two possible causes for this behaviour:

• You have set noshowmode somewhere in your ~/.vimrc or some other configuration source. Type :set showmode or :set smd and see whether the behaviour is as you are used to. If yes, check for set nosmd or noshowmode in your or the system's vim configuration and remove it.


• Or the locale you are using is defect. Do LANG=C and then start vi.

if you have vi/vim installed then vimtutor should be on your machine, just enter that at the command line and follow the walkthrough.

If you are familiar with vi then try vim, which is an improved vi but uses substantially the same controls, and see if that works as expected.

The behaviour of i/esc to get in and out of edit mode should not have changed with the kernel update.