Question

I just did some changes to the .vimrc file and .bash_aliases file and from that time I can’t delete words with backspace key.

My .vimrc file has:

set nocompatible

set number
set incsearch
set autoindent
set ruler
set autowrite
set smarttab
set linebreak
set spell
set et
set title

set mouse=v
set history=50
set tabstop=4
set matchtime=2
set matchpairs+=<:>

syntax enable
filetype plugin indent on
filetype indent on
set sw=4

map <f2> :w\|!python %

hi SpellBad ctermfg=000 guifg=#000

And my .bash_aliases file has two line for Vim:

alias vim="vim -c 'startinsert' -u ~/.vim/.vimrc"
alias vi="vi -c 'startinsert' -u ~/.vim/.vimrc"

My ~/.vim directory doesn’t have a single plugin or script, so there’s isn’t any chance that plugin will cause this.

~/.vim/.vimrc is a symlink. The actual .vimrc file is in ~/vimrc/ directory which is a git repository.

Answer 1

To allow backspacing over everything in insert mode (including automatically inserted indentation, line breaks and start of insert) you can set the backspace option:

:set backspace=indent,eol,start

or

:set backspace=2  "compatible with version 5.4 and earlier

By default this option is empty, not allowing you to backspace over the above-mentioned things. This is the standard Vi behavior.

You can put this line to your vimrc file to have it set automatically when Vim starts:

set backspace=indent,eol,start  " more powerful backspacing

Also, starting from Vim 8.0 if no user vimrc file is found, Vim will set backspace to this value by loading the defaults.vim script.