Re: Easy renaming of files

[Egmont Koblinger <egmont gmail com>]

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 2:58 PM, Felix Miata <mrmazda earthlink net> wrote:

On 2013-01-28 10:45 (GMT+0100) Egmont Koblinger composed:

Marco wrote:

when I hit F6 to rename a file the “to:† field is pre-populated with

the path of the other panel. That's handy if you want to move files,
but annoying if you want to rename the file and the renaming just
adds an extension or removes two characters at the beginning of a
50-character file name. If I start typing I have to retype the
entire file name.

Is there an easier way to rename files, for instance a shortcut to
pre-populate the field with the current file name?

Shift+F6 should do it.

But it doesn't when running on a tty in runlevel[2,3,5] in every distro I can recall using. In the tty case it's inexplicably Shift-F4, just like copy with edit name instead of Shift-F5 is Shift-F3. Why? I know it has something to do with 10 function keys vs. 12 function keys, but shouldn't there be a simple solution? Is there?

This seems to be a problem with the console-data or kbd or whichever similar package of Linux distros... They offer multiple keymaps, and define function keys differently in them.

E.g. type "loadkeys us" -> with the U.S. keymap pressing Shift+F4 will do what you'd expect from Shift-F6.
But type "loadkeys ru" -> with the Russian keymap Shift+F6 works as expected.

Seems that the kernel's builtin keymap makes the Shift key offset the function keys by 10 (drivers/tty/vt/defkeymap.map says «keycode 64 = F6 F16» and later «string F16 = "\033[29~"»), and this is what mc expects too (mc.lib: «f16=\\e[29~»).  Unfortunately, many keymaps, including the probably most widely used "us" wants to be able to assign separate action to F11 and Shift+F1, so they shift by 12 and define «keycode 64 = F6 F18».

There's nothing mc could do about this right now, first all the keymaps should be made consistent.


cheers,
egmont