On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 01:58:28PM +0100, 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.
dialog uses the terminfo description. It happens to know about xterm's
alternate screen:
--keep-tite
Generally (no counter examples come to mind)...
+ what some people expect with alt+whatever
+ is a corruption of meta mode (apparently due to bash),
+ that would magically send an escape character before _some_ keys
(more often before keys that aren't special such as cursor
and function keys -- but that assumption isn't reliable)
+ which isn't related to the terminfo description
(recalling that bash's developer(s) prefer hardcoding to extending
termcap or terminfo).
So... it's not in the terminfo description, and any attempt to make it
a "standard" feature would run into the exceptions to the normal/special
keys assumption.
+ the place to start with a new feature would be with the developers
of terminals and/or shells, etc., who would define it (and agree
on what's common behavior).
>
> Werner
>
> [1] https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1257107
> --
> "Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having
> a peeing section in a swimming pool." -- Edward Burr
--
Thomas E. Dickey <[email protected]>
https://invisible-island.net
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