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I want to bind terminal behavior to hotkeys without having to define escape sequences.

I understand readline binds to characters instead of actual key presses. Can it also bind to the lower level virtual keys? e.g. so I can use CTRL+LEFT_ARROW instead of whatever ascii escape sequence (^[^[D) my current terminal uses.

How can I achieve this behavior (doesn't have to be readline). I don't use X, just the Linux console and terminal text editors.

jiggunjer
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readline can't do that. Some applications can open a connection to the X server and detect X events (such as xev), but the readline library isn't one of those applications.

Call it a technical limitation. readline uses system interfaces (mostly POSIX termios) which can only read the characters sent by the terminal, and has no access to their internal state.

Thomas Dickey
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  • I don't have a window server. Is this limitation by design or would it have technical reasons? – jiggunjer Feb 26 '17 at 07:42
  • @jiggunjer Yes, there's a technical reason: terminal applications receive characters as input, not keys. See “Text mode application, running in a terminal” — “Input”. If you want to have access to key events, use X11. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Feb 26 '17 at 21:27
  • @Gilles I am skeptical of the advice to install a graphics stack just to change the character-centric behavior of a terminal. While terminal applications such as bash receive characters, the terminal itself also receives "keys" from the keyboard. Instead of converting certain keys to characters and passing them on to the application (or ignoring them), I want to map terminal behavior/attribute modifiers to certain keys. Maybe there is a userland alternative to the TERM=linux console that does this. – jiggunjer Feb 27 '17 at 06:47
  • @jiggunjer A shell or text editor running in a terminal is an application. There is a mechanism to bypass the terminal interface and access the underlying hardware driver directly (svgalib) but I doubt that you'll find a shell or text editor that supports it, because everybody has moved to X since about 20 years agao. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Feb 27 '17 at 12:20