emacs on a text console - please help me overcome the shock

[rdiezmail-emacs@yahoo.de]

Hi all:

I'm a "normal" GUI computer user, I've used things like Delphi, Eclipse, gedit, Notepad++ and Visual Studio all my life. I've also been using emacs for some time under Ubuntu and under Windows.
It took me a while to set it up with "standard" behaviour, like shift+arrows for text selection and so on, I found the cua mode to be helpful. Every now and then, I even click on the menus with the mouse. However, I've written some simple, copy-paste lisp too,
so I'm not just a standard mouse user. In fact, my .emacs file has grown much more than I ever thought it would.  8-)


Now I have to work on a remote server via SSH, and the connection is not fast enough to tunnel X Windows over it, so I have to switch to console mode with "emacs -nw".

The console mode has been a shock. There is no mouse at all. I cannot navigate the menus as usual, menu-bar-open is weird and unfriendly. But, worst of all, some key combinations do not work well.

I don't want to use the ESC key as a prefix for anything, and that is normally fine under X Windows. I mean, most of the time, if I press ESC, it just makes the current panel full screen, or it aborts what I'm doing. However, in the console I have to press ESC three times. How can I make ESC react at the first press?

I also use F2 to set bookmarks, and F2 alone continues to work, but Ctrl+F2 does not. There are many other key combinations that don't work properly.

The remote server is Ubuntu 11.04, and I'm root, I can configure anything I want, including terminal types. But I just don't know enough. I've googled about it, but all instructions I found are
so dreadfully complicated. I keep thinking, surely this is a normal scenario: SSH to Ubuntu, run emacs on that console. Is there a web site with simple instructions on how to fix those
keyboard issues? Or can anybody give me easy-to-follow tips here?

Please copy me on the answers, as I'm not subscribed to this list.

Many thanks in advance,
  R. Diez