escape sequences showing up within vi

Question

When I am working in vi there pop up things that look like uninterpreted escape sequences. They come for example when I type i to enter insert mode, or ESC to leave it

Example, triggered by typing i immediately followed by ESC: [>4;m[>4;2m

Version:

vi --version
VIM - Vi IMproved 8.1 (2018 May 18, compiled Apr 15 2020 06:40:31)
Included patches: 1-2269

This has begun a couple of weeks ago, I suspect it comes from patching the Ubuntu operating system. I can clean them with CTRL+L (redraw screen) but they restart popping up as soon as I resume typing.

Guessing that the sequences might try to switch colors, I already applied all the known tricks to disable colors, it makes no difference. The version installed does not even support the syntax on/off (which I find no hardship :) )

Here's my .vimrc:

set nohlsearch
set t_Co=0
highlight LineNr NONE
hi CursorLine NONE
hi Normal cterm=none ctermfg=none ctermbg=none

Answer 1

The comment above was indeed the solution. .vimrc now reads as below, probably I can remove some the earlier experiments.

set nohlsearch
set t_Co=0
highlight LineNr NONE
hi CursorLine NONE
hi Normal cterm=none ctermfg=none ctermbg=none
set t_TE=""
set t_TI=""

Answer 2

I saw something similar today on Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS

• the cause is the vi package installed is vim-tiny, so a minimal version of vim

Installing the more complete version resolved the problem, e.g. doing

$ sudo apt install -y vim