CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vimmacvimtmux
Dustin Martin
Dustin Martin

Reputation: 1327

tmux and Vim: Escape key being seen as ^[ and having long delay

In MacVim and terminal Vim, everything works fine and I have no problems. As soon as I jump into tmux and run Vim there, the escape key starts having a delay of about 1 second and shows up in Vim as ^[.

I'll hit the escape key to exit insert mode but around a 1 second delay will happen before Vim reacts and takes me back to normal mode.

If I type Ctrl+o to get temporarily to insert mode it immediately pops into normal mode with no delay.

If I type jj to get to normal mode (a shortcut I set) it still takes around a second. This leads me to think that the problem may be with Vim and not tmux

I've already set set -sg escape-time 0 in my tmux.conf but it hasn't helped at all.

Any ideas?

Upvotes: 22

Views: 8903

Answers (2)

Puhlze
Puhlze

Reputation: 2614

See https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/23138/esc-key-causes-a-small-delay-in-terminal-due-to-its-alt-behavior.

The issue is with a tmux escape delay. The tmux setting below should correct it:

set -s escape-time 0

Upvotes: 38

ZyX
ZyX

Reputation: 53614

The problem is that escape is the first character of all function keys, arrows, mouse clicks (they are sent to vim by a terminal using some escape sequence), … Hence vim waits for next character at most 'ttimeoutlen' ('timeoutlen' if 'ttimeoutlen' is -1) milliseconds in order to be sure you meant pressing escape and not, for example, <F1>. There is no way to get rid of this delay, but you can narrow it down:

set timeout timeoutlen=1000 ttimeoutlen=100

. This way it will wait 1 second for you to finish the mapping, but only 0.1 second for terminal to finish sending the escape sequence.

Upvotes: 4

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