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Comment by chappar | Hacker News Reader

Does this mean that ^; and ^{ are also equivalent to ESC?

^{ is, but on my terminal ^; just prints out a ;

iTerm2, in vim 1.8

^[ and ^{ do the same thing in Terminal.app (macOS Sierra) and vim 8.0. However, I get the bell sound (which generally denotes invalid input in macOS) for ^; and it prints nothing.

You have control characters for the characters from 64 to 95.

    Control-@ is 0.  
    Control-A is 1, through control-Z is 26.
    Control-[ is 27, escape.
    Control-\ is 28.
    Control-] is 29.
    Control-^ is 30.
    Control-_ is 31.

I guess it could in theory, on my keyboard, however, CTRL seems to override other control chars, so typing ^{ doesn't seem possible at all, at least without any hacks. (I don't have a US layout keyboard.)

According to the bit-wise AND at the end of the article it should, but it seems like there's more to it than just zeroing out the 'column' bits.

Not sure if this is specifically related, but-

CTRL does not actually modify the character code sent from the keyboard. For letters, the same keycode (which maps to ASCII with a constant addition of 0x3D) is always sent. Another byte in the HID report contains bit flags for modifier keys (L/R CTRL, SHIFT, etc); the OS decides what happens after that.

Note that this holds under USB HID.

Not on a modern PC, but on the machine ASCII was originally developed for I could definitely see the CTRL key just pulling one bit low on the keyboard encoder.

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