I use VI a lot to edit configuration file or modify code sometime. After I set up the Ubuntu box in virtualbox, I found that the arrow keys (up, down, left, right) are not working properly. Instead of navigating the cursor through the text, they are actually trying to insert characters letters like A,B… or..whatever letters that I don’t want.

Turned out that the VI that I am comfortable with is actually VIM, and usually VI is a softlink to VIM if they have VIM installed. In my case, VIM is not installed, then you just need to run “sudo apt-get install vim”. And problem solved. Here is the stackoverflow question that helped me.