getting <C-LEFT>, <C-RIGHT>, etc. to work in GNU Emacs under cygwin

getting <C-LEFT>, <C-RIGHT>, etc. to work in GNU Emacs under cygwin

[Charles_Davis]

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I am running GNU Emacs 21.2 under a cygwin BASH shell on an XP-2003 
system.  I would like to use my control key with the arrow keys on the 
"inverted T on my keyboard.  Unfortunately, Emacs does not seem to notice 
when the the control modifier is used with these keys.  The same is 
truewhen the control modifier is used with keys on the "6-pack."

I have tried changing the TERM environment variable.  While that changes 
the definitions of the keys themselves (e.g., <home> may become <find>), I 
still am unable to use the control modifier with these keys.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Regards,
Charles Davis


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Re: getting <C-LEFT>, <C-RIGHT>, etc. to work in GNU Emacs under cygwin

[Luc Teirlinck]

Charles Davis wrote:

    I am running GNU Emacs 21.2 under a cygwin BASH shell on an XP-2003
    system.  I would like to use my control key with the arrow keys on the
    "inverted T on my keyboard.  Unfortunately, Emacs does not seem to
    notice when the the control modifier is used with these keys.  The
    same is truewhen the control modifier is used with keys on the "6-pack."

    I have tried changing the TERM environment variable.  While that
    changes the definitions of the keys themselves (e.g., <home> may
    become <find>), I still am unable to use the control modifier with
    these keys.

These are not ASCII control characters.  Such keys only work if you
are directly communicating with a window system.  If you are often in
situations where this is not the case, then the only solution I know
of is to only use non-ASCII control characters for window manager
bindings and other bindings that only make sense when directly
communicating with a window system.  That is what I personally do.  It
may be that certain operating systems (like MS Windows) do not make this
easy.

Maybe other people know more satisfactory solutions.

Sincerely,

Luc.

Re: getting <C-LEFT>, <C-RIGHT>, etc. to work in GNU Emacs under cygwin

[Charles_Davis]

Luc Teirlinck wrote:
> These are not ASCII control characters.  Such keys only work if you
>are directly communicating with a window system.  If you are often in
> situations where this is not the case, then the only solution I know
>of is to only use non-ASCII control characters for window manager
> bindings and other bindings that only make sense when directly
>communicating with a window system.  That is what I personally do.  It
>may be that certain operating systems (like MS Windows) do not make this
>easy.

Sorry for my denseness--my ignorance of system stuff is unbounded.

"Directly communicating with the Window system":  Well, I am sitting at my
PC communicating with the machine to which my keyboard is attached.  I can
run the Windows version of Emacs on this machine without this difficulty.
I can also run the DJGPP version of Emacs in a Command Prompt window
without this difficulty as well.  The problem crops up only when I open a
CYGWIN window with a BASH shell and try to run the CYGWIN version of Emacs
from there.  Is that what you mean by "directly attached?"

Incidentally, the BASH shell seems to understand the control modifier for
these keys, for I can use them for command-line editing.

Thanks for the help
Charles Davis

Re: getting <C-LEFT>, <C-RIGHT>, etc. to work in GNU Emacs under cygwin

[Stefan Monnier]

>     I am running GNU Emacs 21.2 under a cygwin BASH shell on an XP-2003
>     system.  I would like to use my control key with the arrow keys on the
>     "inverted T on my keyboard.  Unfortunately, Emacs does not seem to
>     notice when the the control modifier is used with these keys.
>     The same is true when the control modifier is used with keys on the
>     "6-pack."

Most likely the problem is that Emacs is not being told.

The terminal emulator under which you run Emacs has to turn function keys and
cursor-movement keys into "escape sequences" of ascii chars.  Most of the
terminal emulators do that fine for non-control'ed and non-shift'ed uses,
but they often use the same escape sequence when the control or shift key
is held, thus losing this pecious information.  Emacs has no way to figure
out that the control key was held in such cases.

You first need to convince your terminal emulator to preserve the
information by using distinct escape sequences depending on the
modifier-keys pressed in conjunction with the function keys.
How to do that is specific to each terminal emulator.


        Stefan

Re: getting <C-LEFT>, <C-RIGHT>, etc. to work in GNU Emacs under cygwin

[Luc Teirlinck]

Charles Davis wrote:

    "Directly communicating with the Window system": Well, I am sitting at
    my PC communicating with the machine to which my keyboard is attached.

If you do `C-x 5 2' and a new window system window pops up, you are
directly communicating with the window system.  If a new Emacs frame
named F2 pops up in the same terminal, you are not.

I in the meantime I found out that `xterm' indeed supports the control
and shifted variants of function keys, as Thomas Dickey pointed out.
I did not even know this.  The Gnome terminal I (used to) use does not
recognize these keys.  I believe I am going to switch to xterm.  That
works for me, because I am using GNU/Linux.  I do not know whether you
can use xterm on MS Windows, however.

Sincerely,

Luc.