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Re: Binding the "Ctrl + ;" key combination to "focus right" command


From: Micah Cowan
Subject: Re: Binding the "Ctrl + ;" key combination to "focus right" command
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 11:41:30 -0700

On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 2:33 AM, Gheorghe Lisca <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I just start using GNU Screen and I want to set up my configuration file.
> More precisely I am trying to bind the navigation commands
> "focus left" to "Ctrl + j"
> "focus down" to "Ctrl + k"
> "focus up" to "Ctrl + l" and
> "focus right" to "Ctrl + ;" .

Unfortunately, it just can't be done. And it's not screen's fault :)

When you use combinations like Ctrl + J or Ctrl + ; in your window
manager, it works fine, because the windowing system (and manager)
gets to see the "real" keysym codes for everything you press. It can
even see the Ctrl and ; events occur separately.

Not so on a terminal. For most normal, printable characters that you
can type with a keyboard, the act of the control key is to take a key
from ASCII hexadecimal codes 0x40 - 0x5F, and shift their codes into
the range of ASCII control character codes, 0x00 - 0x1F.

If you do "man ascii" and look at the hexadecimal table of characters,
you'll see that 0x40-0x5F are mostly the letters A-Z, and just a
smattering of punctuation (specifically, only @, [, \, ], ^ and _). Of
course, for all of these, the shift-key is not used to generate them
(holding Ctrl while pressing 6 is what gives you C-^). In addition to
these, Ctrl-? is also used to emit the DEL key, and certain keys are
usually recognized as acceptable alternatives to these (for instance,
Ctrl-Space works on most terminals as an equivalent to Ctrl-@).

However, most of the punctuation characters, aside from the ones
pointed out above, don't do anything if you try to use Ctrl with them.
; is one of these. For me, using (at the moment) iTerm2 on a Mac,
Ctrl-; just simply generates ; . Possibly, some terminals (yours?) DO
emit something else in the control range for it, but it would be
identical to what some other control-combination performs. There are,
after all, only 32 control characters total in the ASCII table (well,
33 counting DEL). So you might try typing it in, in a program that
shows true characters... "cat -v" might work (and might also not show
anything until you hit Enter), and of course I'd recommend my program
"teseq" (available in the main software repository for many
distributions), whose primary purpose is doing things like that. If
you manage to see some control character, then just bind that one
instead (and keep in mind it's used up, and can't be used for
something separate).

Please also keep in mind that many of the control characters represent
REAL controls that you use frequently for their intended purpose. For
instance, you'd likely never want to bind Ctrl-I (eye), because that's
what your TAB key generates every time you press it. Same, probably,
for Ctrl-M and your Enter/Return key. Your binding of Ctrl-J makes me
a little nervous, as that's the newline/linefeed character... but
really you're unlikely to generate that from your keyboard. In some
terminal modes, the terminal automatically translates Ctrl-M into
Ctrl-M followed by Ctrl-J, or sometimes just Ctrl-J by itself... but
screen wouldn't use those modes for reading the keyboard for itself, I
think. Probably Ctrl-?, but possibly Ctrl-H instead, are what your
backspace key generates (some programs, like Emacs, happily assume you
have Ctrl-H free to bind for "help", assuming your backspace generates
Ctrl-?).

Key combos like Ctrl-F1 and the like get special treatment, as they
don't generate any of the individual controls from the ASCII table,
but instead generate Escape sequences (that usually vary by terminal,
and require the terminfo/termcap database to interpret correctly; they
are a frequent source of pain when some terminal generates escape
sequences that differ from the ones terminfo/ncurses expects).

Anyway, hope that helps, and hope you can find a workaround you find
comfortable!

-mjc



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