Thanks! I never use arrows in insert mode so that's an easy choice for me, but removing 'nocompatible' from my vimrc does nothing and setting 'compatible' instead has side effects like not showing what mode I'm in. Not sure I need it, but I'm also wondering what other side effects I'll run into. The help file mentions a ton of things that I frankly don't care enough to comb through. The only thing I randomly spotted (and knew what it meant without digging deeper) is that this also breaks backspace in insert mode. Overall it makes vim feel quite a lot like vi.

Instead, setting nocompatible and timeoutlen=1 (1ms I guess? Help file doesn't say) works fine in my terminal, I guess because it's not over any sort of network connection. I'll give this a go and see if I run into any issues when using these escape-based features (afaik I use those only rarely) over the network.