Tab key does not yield <tab>

[lichray]

From Xin Li:

It looks like the new nvi version don't accept in the context of
substitute. A minimal use case would be to replace all leading 8
spaces with tabs, what one would do on older version of nvi would be:

: 1,$ s/^ //g

Now, with nvi in FreeBSD 10.x+, entering won't yield the
character. This seems to be a regression from older nvi version.

[leres]

I also noticed that tab has changed since the 1.79 BSD version of nvi. For example, if you want to convert all blanks to tabs you might use:

 :%s/ /^I/g

With 1.79 (FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE) you can just type a bare tab. With 2.1.2 (FreeBSD 10.3-RELEASE) or 2.1.3 you must escape ^I with ^V. This makes doing substitution with multiple tabs particularly problematic.

[edit: I just noticed that you can use a bare tab when in ex mode]

Not only was I a System V vi user in the late 70's but I was one of Keith Bostic's primary testers when he was writing nvi. I trip over this all the time and I think it is definitely a bug.

[lichray]

For now, use

se filec=

in the configuration file to restore the right behavior. I merely set the default file name completion key to Tab, since the file name completion is greatly improved. I was thinking about how to make both work without conflicts, but no luck since then.

[leres]

Thanks for the workaround: it's super helpful!

Is it safe to say that a future version will remove:

 OI(O_FILEC, L("filec=\t"));

from opts_init()?

[lichray]

Maybe I'll remove it, or find someway to let them work together by making completion code contextual.