Re: reading shiftstate in xterm

[Thomas Dickey]

On Sat, 23 Apr 2011, frank wrote:

> Hello Thomas,
>
> Sorry if this is OT.
>
> How can an ncurses based  C application read the
> shift state of Ctrl from xterm?

Generally it can't.

xterm can be told to send most keys as escape sequences (using a control 
sequence "CSI > Ps; Ps m" that corresponds to the modifyOtherKeys 
resource).  I haven't tabulated the possibilities for that, but 
essentially it tells xterm to send an 5 in the corresponding escape 
sequences.  (Shift also is a modifier that could be sent as part of an 
escape sequence, but it is excluded as a special case for printable keys).

I suppose you could make a table of the responses you're looking for, and 
use define_key() to tell ncurses to interpret those results as 
function-keys.  Otherwise, ncurses would see that as an unexpected escape 
sequence, and you'd just get the individual characters returned to wgetch.

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net