I am using ESC in the shell, and I wonder, why it doesn't respond properly -- I am Korn shell sick

Korn shell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I have worked on some AIX in an ancient ksh with vi for the last 4 weeks (Mondays through Fridays, Geneva, Switzerland).

No bash on that machine, no emacs either.
Well, I remembered "set -o gmacs" for ksh at least. Maybe the ksh on that machine had never gotten tortured with that form of emacs mode ever before.

No, I am not going to use pdksh instead of bash.

Although I tried my best, I don't think my cautious shell scripting style will have any effect on anybody I met there:

if test "$ivar" -eq 0

instead of

if test $ivar -eq 0