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From: phys169@csc.canterbury.ac.nz
Newsgroups: comp.terminals
Subject: Re: ESC key on VT200 and VT300 terminals.
Message-ID: <1991Apr22.155857.500@csc.canterbury.ac.nz>
Date: 22 Apr 91 03:58:56 GMT
References: <9104172248.AA10611@cwns9.INS.CWRU.Edu> <1095@keele.keele.ac.uk>
Organization: University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
Lines: 24

In article <1095@keele.keele.ac.uk>, pha21@seq1.keele.ac.uk (Braham Levy) writes:
> In article <9104172248.AA10611@cwns9.INS.CWRU.Edu>, ak104@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Robert Clark) writes:
>> 
>> 
>>   Does anyone know why DEC on VT200 and 300 terminals
>> mapped the ESC key to CTRL-3 and CTRL-3 to the ESC key?
> 
> am i mistaken or doesn't the F11 key generate ESC ???
> 
Sometimes. On terminals like the Wyse 99 (with a VT-style keyboard) it is
labelled as ESC as well as F11, and produces an Escape when in VT100 mode. In
VT200 mode you have to program the key to generate ^[ instead of the ^[ [ 23 ~
it produces by default (send ^[ P 1 ; 0 | 4 3 / 1 B ^[ \ to redefine F11
correctly). Note that ^[ means Control-[, and spaces are added for clarity here
but shouldn't be sent to the terminal. I haven't got a VT200 handy to try it
on, but (barring typos) it should work okay.

The stupidity of the VT200 keyboard design is equalled only by the use of
Ctrl-S in EMACS for searching.  If you run DEC-type keyboards with EMACS, check
that you've got the appropriate lisp tailorings to take adavantage of it, for
example, you should be getting the HELP and FIND keys to work as expected. 

Hope this helps,
Mark Aitchison, Physics, University of Canterbury, New Zealand.