On Mon, Mar 07, 2011 at 11:24:23AM -0500, Benjamin R. Haskell wrote: > >Changing terminal emulators is a done task; xterm has supported > >this since 2008. In fact I asked Thomas Dickey to clarify this for > >me, and he informs me it's all present and working. > > Despite its popularity, xterm is not "most terminal emulators". I > think this is a great move on xterm's part (having a more-or-less > consistent set of escapes for modifiers). But, it's still a > chicken-and-egg problem. Once it's in xterm, it takes a while (if > ever) to filter down to derivatives. And even under xterm the > setting that allows this to work isn't the default. > > I almost didn't send this, since I don't think the lack of terminal > support should be a show stopper (If any terminal supports it, Vim > should use that support), but claiming that it's a done deal because > xterm added a feature to support it a few years ago is naïve.
This is regrettable, yes. But not entirely true. Until xterm added the extended CSI notation using the 2nd parameter for modifiers in e.g. CSI 1;5C for Ctrl-Left, no terminal in the world did it. Now, apart from rxvt which uses its own scheme, prettymuch every terminal does it, and does it -that way-. These things aren't completely set in stone, but they do take a long long time to filter around. I'm very keen to try to shepherd people into one standard and consistently-designed way of doing things. That rxvt does modified keys differently is regrettable, and a consequence of splintered reinvention of wheels. I'm very keen to try not to let that happen any more. It's to this end I tried initially writing this spec for modified keypresses: http://www.leonerd.org.uk/hacks/fixterms/ It comes a little whiney and amateur at the moment, because I'm no good at the social engineering side of trying to motivate a world-full of 1970's-era engineers into trying to fix a big problem. :) But the technical details are there, awaiting someone with better writing skills than I to neaten it up a bit. -- Paul "LeoNerd" Evans leon...@leonerd.org.uk ICQ# 4135350 | Registered Linux# 179460 http://www.leonerd.org.uk/
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