Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!steinmetz!glacier!elliott
From: elliott@glacier.steinmetz
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: ATP Macros (really VT100 arrow keys and //e keyboards)
Summary: Really no easy solution for everyone
Keywords: ATP macros
Message-ID: <11768@steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 7 Aug 88 19:35:27 GMT
References: <368@unocss.UUCP>
Sender: news@steinmetz.ge.com
Reply-To: elliott@crd.ge.com (Jim Elliott)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 55

In article <368@unocss.UUCP> tucker@unocss.UUCP (Gregory A. Tucker) writes:
>However, ATP has this annoying little problem of requiring the 
>solid-apple key to be depressed for the arrows to work properly in
>emulation mode.
There is actually a good reason for this. Unfortunately, on the Apple
keyboard, there is no way for ATP to tell if you are hitting an arrow
key, or actually holding down Ctl-H, Ctl-J, Ctl-K or Ctl-U. If I was
sure that you would never need to send these key-codes, I could have
the arrow keys always send the vt100 sequences (which is, in fact, the
way ATP used to behave). However, when I started using the Emacs
editor (and UNIX in general) I found out that I needed to send those
control keys fairly often. And it is even more confusing to remember
that you have to hold down the Closed Apple key when you want to send
one of those four particular control codes...

> I have tried to compensate for this problem by
>defining macros for the arrow keys.  (ie. ^[[A, ^[[B, etc.)
>This scheme /seems/ to work without any problems on my VMS account,
>but it gives me problems in Unix.  For example, when I run 
>Visual News and depress the arrow key, it gives me two erros
>that say undefined key.  Why should this be?  Of course, this problem
>is easily corrected by depressing the closed-apple key, but that is
>very annoying and requires who hands to do it.  Are there any 
>problems that might arise from defining the ansi sequences as macros,
>or is there anyting special that unix requires to work with vt100
>emulators?
I am not sure exactly what the problem is, but sounds like Visual News
wants the cursor keys to be in a different mode. The VT100 has
configurable cursor keys; they can send two different sets of codes,
and a host machine can request that a particular set be used, by
sending an escape sequence. (See the VT100 section in the Terminal
Emulation part of the ATP help screens for more details). Defining
macros to respond to these requests would be nontrivial.

Where is your Closed-Apple key? At least on my keyboard I have found
that using it in conjunction with the cursor keys is an easy one-hand
operation that has become quite reflexive.

Another solution would be to have ATP allow the default behavior of
the arrow keys to be configurable. When I write the VT100
configuration segment I will keep this in mind.

> ------------------------------+---------------------------------------------
> Gregory A. Tucker- Consultant | Internet: conslt05%zeus.dnet@fergvax.unl.edu 
> Campus Computing              | Bitnet:   CONSLT05@UNOMA1
> Univ. of Nebraska at Omaha    | UUCP:     uunet!btni!unocss!tucker


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