ctrl mappings don't work

[frank]

 >>> huh? slang/ncurses runs the tty in raw mode...

Marco's issue concerns rxvt-unicode not the text console.

There is no keyboard raw mode in a graphic terminal for the simple 
reason that any application below X11 is interacting with X11 and not 
with the kernel. This includes applications written for the text 
console: if they try to switch to raw keyboard, they will wait a 
little while. Note that they are interacting with the terminal, the 
terminal is interacting with X11.

In the tty neither slang nor ncurses do switch to raw keyboard. (Try 
and tell apart TAB, Ctrl-TAB and Ctrl-I in jed or any slang 
application.) When ncurses refers to raw mode, they are talking about 
NOT converting received keystrings (keyboard is in ASCII or UNICODE 
mode) into numbers. For instance, in cooked (i.e. not raw) mode the 
left arrow gets 0404.