Because I couldn’t type to save my life
I’ve been having issues with my backspace key not working properly in vim (spitting out ^? instead of deleting to the left as expected) and after much debugging and searching the web for answers this has finally worked for me [1]:
set t_kb=<press ctrl+v><press backspace>
Where <press ctrl+v><press backspace> means literally that: ctrl + v backspace.
If you’re using Mac OS X’s Terminal.app checking the box for "Delete key sends backspace" in Preferences > Settings > Advanced also seems to do the trick [2] but the aforementioned vim setting should do the trick independently of which terminal app you use.
A common recommendation [3] is to run fixdel in vim’s command line (or adding it to .vimrc) but this did nothing for me but get backspace to behave like delete which I didn’t want.
Additionally you might also benefit from setting vim’s backspace to indent,eol,start (or the short version 2) as it will allow backspacing over auto-indentation, line breaks and the start of inserts:
set backspace=indent,eol,start
These settings can be set in vim’s command line or added to .vimrc.
