Re: jump to letter shortcut?

[Theodore Kilgore <kilgota banach math auburn edu>]

On Thu, 29 Oct 2009, Helmut Hullen wrote:

> Hallo, May,
>
> Du meintest am 29.10.09 zum Thema jump to letter shortcut?:
>
> > I tried to find it in manual but without luck- is there a shortcut to
> > "jump to letter" in MC? e.g., I hame a zillion files in a directory
> > and would like to jump to the first that starts with P?
>
> Do you search "ctrl s <letter(s)>"?
>
> Viele Gruesse!
> Helmut

Helmut,

I do not know if this was the situation, or not, but:

If he is attempting to do that in an xterm, then without special measures 
it may not work. For example, it may print some kind of funny character at 
the command line instead of doing what is wanted and expected. It is 
possible to substitute Cntrl-S in that situation and to get the response 
which is expected with Alt-S. But basically, what has happened is that the 
expected behavior of the Alt key has been intercepted and changed by X. 
Several other key bindings which MC uses all the time are thereby 
borked in that situation, too. For me, the solution was to create a file 
called .Xdefaults in my home directory which contains the single line

XTerm*metaSendsEscape:  true



The problem is caused by the introduction of Unicode key mappings in X. 
It 
is possible to disable Unicode key mappings in X, but as I recall there is 
no discussion of this in the mc documentation. At least, last time that I 
faced this issue there was not.

It is probably a good idea for the future to provide such documentation in 
some natural place, such as the man page, and also to look more deeply 
into reconciling or forestalling the difficulties, somehow.

Hoping that this helps,

Theodore Kilgore