Re: Home and end keys (was Re: Make Debian better)

[Russell <rjshaw@iprimus.com.au>]

Bob Proulx wrote:
> 
> > > > To activate the Home and End keys (dedicated or keypad ones) in xterm,
> > > > press ctrl+button 2 (mouse left+right) to get the xterm "VT Options"
> > > > menu, then select "Enable Application Cursor Keys". Alternatively,
> > > > type: echo -n "^[[?1h", where ^[ is the literal ESC character.
> 
> Why do you have to activate them?

I want to activate them so that my keyboard doesn't have stupid
non-functional keys. One of the things that puts most newbies off
(including me) is when the keyboard doesn't work as it was designed
for, and works well in windows. Yes, i liked windows better than
linux for this. It also irritated me a couple of years ago when
i first tried mandrake and the back-space button didn't do as
it should.

I use the keypad Home and End keys a *lot*, to move
the cursor to the beginning or end of a command line in xterm
that i've called up from the history list using the keypad Up
and Down buttons. The same thing works in dos. The equivalent
bash emacs commands are ctrl-a and ctrl-e, but that's just too
bad for a braindamaged windoze user;)

> What are you doing to deactivate them?

I will *never* deactivate them. If a keyboard has no numeric
keypad, i'll ditch it for one that has. If you do want to
deactivate it, you can use the xterm "VT Options" menu, or
comment out the setting in Xresources.

> > > Man, if you know how long I have been stuggling with this (and many users
> > > too). Why isn't this the standard in Debian (e.g. keys ought to do what
> > > you expect them to do, not just *beep*)?
> >
> > I'd been under the impression it was just a bug. xterms in unstable work
> > fine.
> 
> As far as I can tell on many machines xterms in stable work fine.
> Perhaps they got broken in testing now fixed in unstable?
> 
> Let me repeat myself.  "If you just do a clean woody install the home
> and end keys work fine in an xterm in woody."

Well, i did a clean install of woody a few pieces at a time using
dselect, and the keypad Home and End didn't work by default. I'm
using a PC-102 keyboard, but from what i can see in /etc/X11/xkb,
a PC-104 should do the same. Changing XkbModel in xf86config-4
didn't help either.

> Having said that I assume there must be a bug somewhere if so many
> users are reporting this as a problem.