Escape sequence voodoo.

[David Thomas]

Hi all,

The terminal emulator rxvt-unicode supports perl plugins, whereby I
can perform actions in response to escape sequences (amongst other
events).  I've been enjoying hacking at these.  My immediate
application is to allow notifications in notify-osd on my local
machine without the complications or (ugly) delays of doing it with
notify-send and X forwarding, and this works well when urxvt can see
the commands.  I reach a conundrum, however, when trying to make these
play nice with screen.

Screen, correctly I believe, does not pass unrecognized escape
sequences, so they never get to urxvt.  I can hop through N screens,
for a fixed N, by wrapping with N layers of \eP...\e\\, but that's
ugly, inflexible, and not really the right way anyway.  The truly
correct way, I think, is to add terminal capabilities for each of my
extensions, and add these to my termcap files for both screen and
urxvt, which is straightforward enough for the most part but I am
wondering if there's any means (short of hacking at the source) of
making screen query and use some particular capability of its parent
terminal when it sees a particular escape sequence.  Ideas for other
ways of accomplishing what I'm setting about here are also welcome, as
are questions, and pointers for where it should be added in the source
if it that is required (though I realize this is a users list).


Thank you,

David