Re: [Nano-devel] [RFC] selecting text by holding Shift

[David Niklas]

On Tue, 15 Dec 2015 12:45:20, address@hidden wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 14, 2015, at 22:48, address@hidden wrote:
> > Shift arrow key does not work with my term. Ctrl and Alt do. I'm using
> > rxvt.
> > Neither do HOME and END.  
> 
> Strange.  For me, with the latest patch, on an rxvt, <Shift+Left>,
> <Shift+Right>, <Shift+Home> and <Shift+End> work: they
> select text in the expected way.  (The latter two don't work on
> an xterm or Gnome terminal.)
>
I mean work for nano. In other words these keys are bound to rxvt's
behaviour, they can't be used for nano.

> All the other combinations don't work: they either do nothing,
> saying "Unknown Command", or do the same as if Ctrl or Alt
> weren't pressed.
> 
Yes, they can be used by nano.

> > HINT: Use terminfo. /etc/terminfo /usr/share  
> 
> Hints don't help me anything.  Give me working code.
> 
I don't have your keyboard so I can't provide you with working code on
this one. I think you did not understand what I proposed:
1. Your kernel maps different keys to different codes.
2. Your WM decides which keys it listens to and does not pass them to
   the application.
3. Your terminal consults terminfo to figure out how to interpret your
   key-codes.
4. Your terminal decides which keys it listens to and does not pass
   them to nano.

What I suggested was that since you probably do not want to rebuild your
terminal emulator from scratch and possible customize your WM's key
bindings that you could remap the keys using terminfo, which is highly
dependent on your preferences and your keyboard. I have 15 dead keys on
my laptop and 1 or 2 on my desktop, eventually I will remap them, you
might not have this problem, you might want both alt keys to map to the
same key-code, etc.
My idea was that you could remap any of your keys to Mod[1-4] and then
you'd have a whole new set of keys to play with in nano.

Thanks, David