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When I open up vim, it starts off with :2R already entered into the command line. I tried commenting out my entire .vimrc, and then it opens up starting in replace mode, with the 2 key pre-pressed (in other words, I insert some text, press <ESC>, and the text appears twice), which is the same as if I had pressed 2R upon opening vim.

How should I go about debugging this? I don't think it can be an issue with my .vimrc, so then what could it be?

For reference, I just updated to version 8.2 via ppa:jonathonf/vim.

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    Are you using <Esc> in any mappings in your vimrc? In my answer here notice the reference to 2R... Why does terminal vim enter replace mode with my vimrc file?
    – B Layer
    Commented Dec 2, 2020 at 20:50
  • Thanks for the helpful link. I do use <ESC> in some mappings, but never on the left-hand side. Further, commenting out the whole .vimrc does not stop the 2R from occurring. I opened up vim with a fully-commented .vimrc, and used :scriptnames to find that the only other files loaded are /usr/share/vim/vimrc, ~/.vim/filetype.vim, ~/.vimrc, and some files from /usr/share/vim/vim82/....
    – nullromo
    Commented Dec 2, 2020 at 21:59
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    What terminal emulator are you using? What is the $TERM environment variable set to?
    – filbranden
    Commented Dec 3, 2020 at 3:20
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    If you're using the right kind of terminal (e.g. true xterm) and you send it the special character sequence <Esc>[6n (note: <Esc> prints as ^[) the terminal will reply with the cursor's current row and column. (From xterm terminal you can try it yourself with echo -e "\e[6n".) The exact format of the response is <Esc>r;cR. If cursor is on column 2 then you can see where 2R might come from. I'm not sure of exactly how, though, the mix of Vim and a terminal emulator with mediocre xterm emulation results in the output getting into Vim as a command.
    – B Layer
    Commented Dec 4, 2020 at 3:21
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    From what I read and saw in the code that control sequence is used for just a single check at startup (related to character widths in Unicode encodings like utf-8) and thus shouldn't be a source of further problems.
    – B Layer
    Commented Dec 5, 2020 at 22:50

1 Answer 1

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To summarize the question comments, this is a terminal emulator control sequence bug. The easiest fix is to install and use WSLTTY. Simply download the latest release and run the installer, then launch WSL from the newly-installed program.

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