Can’t use Alt/Meta

[towolf]

Not sure if that has anything to do with termcap, but I cannot use things like <Alt>Period or <Alt>Backspace

[dvdhrm]

Could you elaborate this a bit more? Do you want to use these as --grab-XY= or do they have special bindings in other terminals? Or do you want to use them in SSH as special keys? I'm not following, sorry.

[etam]

My use-case: In Midnight Commander there are lots of commands like <Alt>i or <Shift>F3. When I'm trying to use them, it behaves like I was just pressing i or F3.

[dvdhrm]

Indeed, xterm generates '\302\210' on alt+backspace. Hm, I haven't found anything about that in the vt220 specs. I will have a look how these are handled by xterm and Co.

[towolf]

Well for me it’s specific inputrc bindings like

"\e\C-h": backward-kill-word
"\e*": insert-completions
"\e.": yank-last-arg

check bind -p for these ...

[dvdhrm]

Currently the problem is that kmscon ignores the ALT/MOD1 key entirely. That is, the bash doesn't even know whether it was pressed or not.

http://invisible-island.net/xterm/ctlseqs/ctlseqs.html
This tries to explain the ALT/META keys but I haven't quite understood it yet. It doesn't seem to be the behavior my bash shows.

http://www.vt100.net/docs/vt510-rm/chapter8
This also does not mention the ALT key for normal keys.

Hm, sorry that i cannot fix this right away. I will have to look into this again this week. Thanks for the fast responses!
(Or maybe I am really missing something obvious here?)
David

[bluetech]

I can confirm this, in almost all terminal emulators I know (well except xterm) meta should should send \033 (escape) before the key. xterm has a config for that called metaSendsEscape (see the ctrlseqs file you linked to), and as I said it's the default almost everywhere. A quick test if it works is ALT-b to back a word, and ALT-f to forward a word, which should work in every readline application (e.g. bash).

[bluetech]

And btw, the mod to use for this is UTERM_MOD1_MASK.

[dvdhrm]

I've pushed a fix to the repository:
8deb82f

Thanks a lot for the fast responses. It still bothers me that XTerm disables altSendsEscape by default and uses the 128-shift instead. However, if the other terminals enable it by default, it is probably the best to do this in kmscon, too. (I also don't see any reason why that 128-shift should be any useful).

If there are any more issues with this, you can reopen it. Thanks!
David