Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!arisia!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Defining function keys
Message-ID: <987@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 13 Apr 89 06:05:33 GMT
References: <1869@umbc3.UMBC.EDU> <9991@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
Lines: 17

In article <9991@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
>In article <1869@umbc3.UMBC.EDU> rostamia@umbc3.UMBC.EDU (Rouben Rostamian) writes:
>>Is there a way to define function keys to execute certain commands in UNIX?
>
>Not normally, because all the UNIX terminal handler sees is a sequence of
>ASCII codes starting with ESC, and it cannot assume that the sender of
>those codes conforms to X3.64.

If you have a terminal whose function keys can be bound to user-specifiable
strings, there is no problem.  Ann Arbor Ambassadors come to mind, there
must be lots of others.  I'm typing this on a Sun-3/50, and I have my
function keys bound to some strings I find useful.

Last year a couple of programs were posted to comp.sources.unix which
would take over terminal I/O and let you run a program underneath them;
one was called ILE, the other I forget the name of.  You could easily
adapt ILE to do function key mapping.