Re: mc from minicom

[Thomas Dickey <dickey his com>]

On Mon, 29 Nov 2010, Eric Gillespie wrote:

> On 29 November 2010 07:53, Thomas Dickey <dickey his com> wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 28 Nov 2010, Kevin Wilson wrote:
> >
> >  Hi,
> > >  I am trying to use mc on a machine to which I am connected via minicom
> > > (serial  connection).
> > > MC opens ok, but the keys are not functioning well.
> >
> > minicom acts as a terminal emulator - sort of like a vt100, with color
> > (and odd line-drawing).  That probably means it doesn't have function
> > keys - vt100's don't have home/end, etc.
> >
> > --
> > Thomas E. Dickey
> > http://invisible-island.net
> > ftp://invisible-island.net
...
> If you can, try this: export TERM=vt220; then start mc. That probably has
> support for more keys. I'm not entirely sure of that.

well... looking at the source for version 2.4, in src/wkeys.c it does
have some limited ability to match keys from the terminal description.
But it's limited.  Here are the (termcap) names it looks for:

static const char *func_key[] = {
  "", "k1", "k2", "k3", "k4", "k5", "k6", "k7", "k8", "k9", "k0",
  "kh", "kP", "ku", "kl", "kr", "kd", "kH", "kN", "kI", "kD",
  "F1", "F2", NULL };

That is (more/less) function-keys 1-10, cursor-keys and the 
editing-keypad.  The names would be documented in terminfo(5).

But it's limited: it doesn't really know about application-mode.

(minicom was originally designed to just use the Linux terminal 
description, modify it a little to make it act like a vt100, and has 
probably a number of assumptions about that, still embedded in the code).

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net