MC key bindings

[Ron van Schyndel <ronvs rmit edu au>]

HI All,

I use mc largely for accessibility reasons - don't have to use a mouse.  In Gnome, I sit most inside an Xterm window using the GUI only when I really have to (my very poor vision demands it, since too many program mess with the cursor and the I bar is all but invisible to me - even changing it in .Xdefault seems to last for a very short time before some program shanghai's it and does not return it to its previous state.)

One problem I found with MC is that keys cannot be bound.

This made me recall an old curses-based file manager that I had used for a while a long time ago over serial connection to a Pyramid unix box.

It is 'scan' by Patrick J. Wolfe and was released in
 comp.sources.misc vol 20 issue 1, 21 May 1991
You can unshar (*remember that? :) it from Google groups.

It was an ordinary FM, but its main virtue for now was runtime configurable key bindings under curses.  Since you had to type the key and associate it with a function, only the keys that 'scan' could actually receive could be changed.

It is actually quite a neat and intuitive key binding interface.

It is not GPL, but has a similar license.  Maybe it can be used in MC.  I got it working under fc7 in 1/2 hour, with many warnings about pointers, but it still worked.  Now THAT is a testament to good coding style (except for the pointers bit)!

Cheers, Ron

PS.
On my wishlist is a way to scan *already-installed* RPM's (ie get the info from the DB, not from an RPM file) into an rpm VFS-like display (except instead of INSTALL/UPGRADE, you have REMOVE/CHECK-DEPENDENCY).  I am trying to figure out how to use externalize panels to get part of this functionality.