Navigating with arrow keys in vi is slow

Question

I use rlogin to remote login from a Solaris 10 Sparc to a Solaris 10 x86 host. When using vi, navigating with the h, j, k, and l keys is very fast and smooth. However, navigating with the arrow keys is slow, with a delayed response and/or the cursor jumps to catch up. The two systems have essentially the same configuration. I know this isn't a lot of information to go on, but what might be causing the arrow keys to respond slower?

Answer 1

Each time you press a cursor key, it sends typically three times as many bytes as h,j,k,l. (It could send more, if you happen to be using a modified sequence, e.g., shift-cursor-up in xterm would double that amount). Also, the first byte of each cursor key is an escape character, and the remote host has to wait for the last of those bytes to be received before it completes matching them against the sequence for a given cursor key.