Re: console key tutorial, revised (was: Re: Make Super key work in console - was Re: math (was: Re: not good proposal: "C-z <letter>" reserved for users))

[Yuri Khan]

On Sun, 14 Feb 2021 at 15:06, Jean Louis <bugs@gnu.support> wrote:

> It means you do not know a solution, I will assume so. We need it. It
> could liberate thousands of possible key combinations before the
> keyboard dies on desktop. Rush.

For X, please see Kitty [1]. It is a terminal emulator that implements
an alternative key encoding scheme [2] which allows to represent all
modifier keys, all modifier+key combinations, even key releases.

[1]: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/
[2]: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/keyboard-protocol.html

There is a “small” issue — you will need to create a terminal-specific
initialization file [3] in Emacs that defines an ‘input-decode-map’
that will translate Kitty escape sequences to Emacs representation,
and you will need to invent a way to ignore key release sequences.

[3]: (info "(elisp) Terminal-Specific")

Last time I tried that, I set up ‘input-decode-map’ so that it
translates each key release sequence to an empty key sequence. But,
due to the way prefix key prompting works in Emacs, it clears the echo
area each time a key is released. Which pretty much kills every status
message Emacs might produce in response to a key *press*.

Maybe there are other ways to ignore key release sequences. I have not
been able to devote enough time into discovering them.

If you succeed in setting up Emacs with Kitty’s advanced key protocol,
I’d be very interested.