Alexey I. Froloff wrote:
* Bram Moolenaar <Bram@> [061022 14:27]:
How do you distinguish between someone typing "<Esc> key" and
"<Esc> key" generated by Alt+key?
I don't. No program can do that, as Tony mentioned earlier.
bash (readline) for example:
M-b - backward-word
Alt+b and <Esc>b works both the same, if Alt+Key sends <Esc>Key
sequence. Consider this as a feature.
With 'em' unset Vim behaves like every console application.
I should qualify what I said before: if you have 'ttimeout' (or 'timeout') on,
and 'ttimeoutlen' set to a well-chosen positive value (longer than the delay
between successive bytes added by the keyboard interface for a single
keypress, but shorter than your usual typing speed), Vim will be able to
determine that <Esc> <key> was typed-in rather than <M-key>, by means of the
timeout: let's say you have ":set ttimeout ttimeoutlen=100" then if the delay
between the Esc byte and the next one is > 0.1s Vim will see it as Escape +
something, not Meta-something. (By default, 'ttimeoutlen' is negative, meaning
that the same, relatively long timeout applies for both special keys and
mappings.)
What I said before still applies in the case of key combinations which send a
single byte (e.g. Meta-is-high-bit), because in that case there is no timeout.
Best regards,
Tony.
