Recently my Linux install has been giving my issues, and rather taking the time (which I don’t have) to fix it, I fell back onto my Windows Vista installation to get my by while I finish the project I am working on. Since I do not have my wonderful terminal to manage my ssh connections, I have had to use PuTTY. Unfortunately PuTTY and VI were not communicating properly. Whenever I pressed backspace, it would send ^? and echo it as text rather than sending ^H which will backspace a character. This drove me nuts. After looking through PuTTY’s settings the fix was rather simple. In the PuTTY configuration select the keyboard tab and change The Backspace Key from Control+? to Control-H.

linux putty vi