You mentioned that you left this on purpose, Joe. How would you go about fixing it though?
it’s a matter of setting an environment variable on the router to let it know what kind of terminal you’re using. Then vim knows how to treat it like a screen instead of a serial stream.
I haven’t tested it specifically, but something like
TERM=xterm-color
while connected to the router should do it.
I left it out because that’s not always going to fix it, and if you poke at embedded systems long enough, you’re going to encounter target systems that don’t have a functioning text editor, so being aware of some workaround will be handy.
If that doesn’t work for you, let me know and i’ll dig into my notes to see what i actually did.