Re: Terminal answers

[Wiseman <wiseman1024 gmail com>]

> > I also noticed terminals (at least the ones I tried) use ^[ as Esc,
> > and ^[xxx for all other non-printable keys. This has the very
> > undesirable effect of making Esc a dead key (for which mc has a fix,
> > but a delay of 1 second is far too much; I'd rather have 0 seconds).
> > This also has the effect that Alt+<letter> is the same as Esc
> > <letter>. Are there any terminals that will handle Esc differently, so
> > that it becomes a real key you can just use normally?
>
> I'm speculating here-- I'm not sure that is MC's doing.  I suspect that
> inserting an Escape character before a letter was the original function
> of the Alt key. But I imagine some keyboards don't have an Alt key.
> Instead, those users have to press <Esc>, then the letter.  Setting the
> delay to 0 seconds would make that impossible.

It should be configurable, as it is whether there should be a delay
and automatically consider Escape or not. (Currently, you can choose
whether your Escape will time out and be treated as a simple escape,
or mc has to wait for another key forever, in which case you need to
send another Escape to mean Escape).)

I think people with Alt/Meta keys (i.e. 99.999% of them) should be
allowed to set the delay to 0 seconds (or something like 0.01 seconds
to ensure you don't mistake something like ^[A for Escape, then A).