cursor behavior when exiting <insert> mode

Question

I understand that when in insert mode the cursor is described as between characters, and when in normal mode the cursor is supposed to be on a valid character. I have been having a lot of trouble with this behavior recently.

If I enter insert mode I will use _ to represent the cursor

and append some text to the end of a line_

When I exit insert mode the cursor is dropped to the beginning of the line below it so I would end up here:

and append some text to the end of a line
_

This really breaks up my flow when I am typing and I would like to modify the behavior so that the cursor is instead left at the end of the line. Since there is no character there ...

I know it wont just stay here_

But I would prefer it if the cursor just moved to the character before when I exit insert mode

So I would end up her_

Pretending there is an e at the end of that line and I have the cursor on it.

Does anyone know a way to achieve this? All of the documentation I have read suggests that this is the normal behavior anyway.

I have remapped <esc> to jk but if I remove that from my .vimrc I still en up at the beginning of the next line

Answer 1

Thanks to the comment by @muru I was able to figure this out. I turns out in my .vimrc I had this line to remap jk to <esc>

inoremap jk <esc>

but there was a space inserted at the end of the line. If I remove the space the problem is fixed. I did not realize that white space characters were important when making these customization.

This blog pointed out that any characters used (even white-space) when remapping commands were interpreted.