Is my Vim 7.3 not behaving the same as Vim 7.1?

Question

I always wanted to ask this question, but thought it was somehow my fault. I use Vim in two places: one on Ubuntu and the other on Cygwin.

Ubuntu: VIM - Vi IMproved 7.1 (2007 May 12, compiled May 6 2008 16:24:07) Cygwin: VIM - Vi IMproved 7.3 (2010 Aug 15, compiled Aug 19 2010 13:06:02) 

In 7.1, when I go into Insert mode with Esc-i , I can use the arrow keys and use it like a regular text editor, like nano. However, in another version 7.3, when I enter Insert mode, I can no longer use the arrow keys or spaces. When I hit any of them, I get characters like C , D , etc. For arrow keys. Maybe something is missing me, but I'm not sure why this is a discrepancy, and if I can return to how it was before. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Usually doing :set nocompatible works: Linux vi arrow keys broken in insert mode

In this case, I tried this in cygwin, and you also needed :set term=ansi to make it work.

So the viraptor pretty much had this, except that you want to set NOcompatible:

 :set nocompatible :set term=ansi 

Answer 2

Try:

 :set compatible :set term=ansi 

(or other terminals - windows may need "win32")

Answer 3

I don’t know if you understood this. Unfortunately, I cannot add this as a comment so far, so adding it as an answer try:

 :set nocompatible 

in itself - it helped.