Re: key bindings

[Phil!Gregory]

* Zenaan Harkness <address@hidden> [2004-07-21 06:54 +1000]:
> On Tue, 2004-07-20 at 13:35, Phil!Gregory wrote:
> > Indeed.  This is why many people rebind the escape key to something they
> > use less often.  I have mine set to C-z.
> 
> OK, this one I tried many, many combinations - bind, bindkey, no
> command, "" or '' as command, searching man page for "unbind" and all
> instances of "bind", passing ^A and ^a, with and without -k option (for
> bindkey, each time rerunning screen to see if it worked, and in no
> combination did I successfully manage to "unbind" the C-a key in screen.

You want the 'escape' command.  For my setup, I use

  escape ^zz

which means "use C-z (^z) as the escape character and 'C-z z' to send a
literal ^z to the program inside screen".

> I did however successfully bind F2 (ie. Fn12) to also be screen's
> "command" key. So I'm putting that into my muscular memory.

If you want to use that regularly, you'll probably want to remove the
normal escape key with

  escape ''

> what better alternatives you'd suggest for screen's command key?

Well, I found that C-z worked for me because I stopped suspending things
with screen.  Why suspend when you can just make another window and run
multiple programs at once?  For a while I was using C-\ as mu escape key,
since I almost never send breaks to my programs.

> Actually, is S-C-a used in EMACS (Shift+CTRL+a)? If not, how do I get
> the key code so I can map it?

I don't believe it's possible to use S-C-a, because it's not a distinct
character.  (Screen uses standard characters from the ASCII charset for
its escape character.  ASCII has 'a' (0x61) and 'A' (0x41) but only one
with control: '^A' (0x01).  This ASCII limitation is why you can't use all
the nonalphanumerics with control.  Things like ^\ and ^@ exist, but
others, like ^$ and ^% simply don't.)  Any program that distinguishes
between C-a and S-C-a is getting the character and then explicitly
checking the state of the shift key.  screen has no facility to specify
this.

-- 
...computer contrarian of the first order... / http://aperiodic.net/phil/
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