--with-ncurses problems

Pavel Roskin proski at gnu.org
Mon Aug 27 18:10:09 UTC 2001


Hi, Tomasz!

> Remember some terminals has only few function keys (for example VT100 have
> *only* F1-F4).

That's why the "Learn keys" dialog is confusing to some people.  Just
because you cannot teach MC a key (e.g. keypad plus or F13) it doesn't
mean that MC is buggy or something is wrong with the system.

Essentially, MC implements its own key sequences for almost all keys:
"Esc number" for F1-F10, "Esc [+-*]" for keypad +, - and *, "Esc >" for
End, "Esc <" for Home, Ctrl-D for Delete and so on.

Unfortunetely, those keys are not documented in one place, they are not
configurable (they could be in [terminal:general] in mc.lib) and they are
not defined for F11-F20, so that you cannot start editing a new file on a
terminal without F14 and you cannot bypass viewer filters (which is more
a more serious problem) if you don't have F13.

MC has a lot of sequences hardcoded, but some of them cannot be expressed
in terms of mc.lib, for example the sequences for all terminals starting
with "xterm".  mc.lib parser doesn't code to recognize things like
[terminal:xterm.*] (not that I consider this a good idea).

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin





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