Whenever I hit the end or beginning of a line, I get this very odd character where my cursor was. Any idea what may be causing this? I believe I have my fonts and theme correctly installed. I'm using Debian with the default xfce terminal.
My guess is that it is your font, encoding or both that are at work. It's very hard to tell exacly what the cause is, but i recommend you reinstall font or check if you have the same problem with another font.
001b, which is the escape character. There is something in your vimrc file that does this (either something you added yourself, or a plugin). See: How do I debug my vimrc file?. – Martin Tournoij Mar 6 '16 at 18:28