On 25/02/2026 14:37, Dr. Werner Fink wrote:
On 2026/02/25 14:25:03 +0000, Ian Abbott wrote:
On 25/02/2026 12:58, Dr. Werner Fink wrote:
Hi,
I've a bug report about dialog not supporting the Alt key. Means
e.g. that
dialog --yesno Hallo 6 30
return for both Alt-y and Alt-n or Alt-Y and Alt-N the value 255.
This is nowadays somehow uncommon[1]. It would very helpful
to be able to navigate not only with cursor or tab keys but
also with the ALt and the coloured characters of the buttons.
Werner
[1] https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1257107
It is probably difficult to do anything different for those terminal
emulators that interpret the Alt/Meta modifier as "insert an ASCII ESC
character before the typed character".
On bash prompt I do a `cat -A` shows for Alt-x, Alt-y, and Alt-n
^[x^[y^[n
but bindkey only accepts single characters as it seems not to
identify events but characters only (curses_key). Also the
resulting action can not bind to a defined button or its label
(dialog_key).
Perhaps one option is to implement an `--ignore-esc` option to ignore
the ESC key. For portability in scripts, I thought that could be
combined with the `--ignore` option to ignore unsupported options on
older versions of dialog, but it seems that doesn't really work:
dialog --ignore --ignore-esc --yesno Hallo 6 30
Unknown option --ignore-esc.
Use --help to list options.
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