Re: Ctrl-[ ?

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> >> There is no reason whatsoever to disallow binding C-[ on GUI Emacs
>> >> the same way you can bind any other key.
>> >
>> > My understanding of what Stefan wrote was that this is NOT disallowed.
>> 
>> The key phrase is "the same way you can bind any other key." Stefan's
>> suggestion does not comply with that.
>
> For me, the key part was "disallowed".

If *-set-key functions don't work with those combinations, as far as the
user is concerned, he is disallowed to bind them. Not everyone has a
Stefan at hand to come with a hack to work around the limitation.

>> One thing that I'll like to know is why the hard restriction about
>> C-[/C-i exists at all.
>
> That was already explained: the reason is history and the desire to
> have identical behavior by default on all frame types.

It is easy to understand from where it came, what is puzzling is the
fact that it remained to this day.

>> It is understandable that the default bindings mimic what you get on
>> the terminal, but forcing the user to jump through hoops to rebind
>> those keys helps no one.
>
> I don't see how we can avoid jumping through hoops when the text
> terminal produces an ASCII key code whereas a GUI terminal doesn't.  I
> invite you to read keyboard.c and keymap.c, where you will find a few
> more "accidents" like this.

It is not possible (and even more practical than sprinkling the C code
base with special cases) to bind those key combinations to the
terminal-emulation functionality using the normal methods (keymaps) when
running as a gui? Or is it the problem that gui and tty frames can't
have different keymaps?