How to get the Arrow keys to work in Emacs
The arrow keys can not always be made to work correctly over dialup. In
order to make them work, for starters, the correct terminal emulation must
be used, the communications program being used must be translating
correctly, and there cannot be other programs (such as Windows or possibly
the communications program itself) "capturing" the arrow keys and not
sending them to the Athena side. There are ways of fixing the first two,
however, if this is the problem.
In general, if you are using vt100 terminal emulation (on Athena, and in
your communications software, where appropriate), you can add the
following lines to your .emacs file (create one if you don't already have
one):
(if (not window-system) ;; Only use in tty-sessions.
(progn
(defvar arrow-keys-map (make-sparse-keymap) "Keymap for arrow keys")
(define-key esc-map "[" arrow-keys-map)
(define-key arrow-keys-map "A" 'previous-line)
(define-key arrow-keys-map "B" 'next-line)
(define-key arrow-keys-map "C" 'forward-char)
(define-key arrow-keys-map "D" 'backward-char)))
(Note: Another common possibility is replacing the "[" with "O" in line 4
of this code.)
If after loading the new .emacs file, nothing happens when using the arrow
keys (or if nothing happened before), then you are probably running inside
a program that is capturing the arrow keys, and there isn't any "standard"
way of avoiding this. (Usually, there is NO way.) However, if you get
errors trying to use the arrow keys, first make sure the terminal
emulation is set properly. If that doesn't help, you should make sure
these are the escape sequences that your arrow keys are really sending.
To do this, type the following sequence of keys (The spaces are here just
to make the sequence clearer; it's easier if you don't type them, but you
can---the output below will just have extra SPC's in it.)
# up-arrow down-arrow right-arrow left-arrow # C-h l
(In other words, a '#' key, each of the arrows in turn, the '#' key again,
and control-h l). This will display a history of the last 100 keystrokes
you have pressed, and if the arrow keys translate to anything, this will
show them. For example, you might see something like this:
a n s l a t e SPC t o SPC a n y t h i n g , SPC t h
i s SPC w i l l SPC s h o w SPC t h e m . SPC SPC F
o r SPC e x a m p l e , SPC y o u SPC m i g h t SPC
s e e SPC s o m e t h i n g SPC l i k e SPC t h i s
: RET RET # ESC [ A ESC [ B ESC [ C ESC [ D # C-h l
The # signs help you determine where your arrow key translations are. In
this example, which shows the "correct" translations for vt100 emulation,
the up arrow translates as "ESC-[ A", the down arrow as "ESC-[ B", and so
on. Once you know these translations, you can adjust the code given above
appropriately. If you aren't sure how to do this, ask a consultant in
olc.
In the worst case, when the arrow keys cannot be used at all, you can
still move the cursor around with the following commands:
Cursor up C-p
Cursor down C-n
Cursor right C-f
Cursor left C-b
last updated: 6/25/95
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