You can't spell "evil" without "vi".

[Alessandro Rubini]

> Ok, making poll wait 300 miliseconds before deciding there's no next character 
> in a pending escape sequence seems to have fixed it.  (At least I can't 
> reproduce the problem under qemu anymore.)  The downside is that when you hit 
> escape with nothing after it, the gui won't update for 1/3 of a second, but 
> that's way better than corrupting data.

Actually, I remember on good old unix with good old green-phosphors
vt100-lookalike terminals the delay after pressing ESC was there.

We were all happy back then, as we knew the reason why.

I run real ARM systems and I sometimes have the same issues with vi,
so I vote for the delay from good old days. Thanks a lot for digging
in the problem

[disclaimer: while arrow keys have definitely been a problem for me
and I choose to turn back to hjkl instead of fixing the problem, I'm
not sure it was under busybox vi on the target system]

Thanks a lot for digging in the problem
/alessandro