ASCII table and history – Or, why does Ctrl+i insert a Tab in my terminal?

1a) try to figure out what the escape code for the play/pause key is 1b) it still suffers from the issue that esc keypresses cannot be distinguished from other escape codes 1c) The keyboard protocol can be turned on/off by user config, so there is no robust way for software running in the terminal to know if it is available or not. 1d) it does not support any modifiers beyond the basic 4 1e) It has no support for lock keys num lock/caps lock 1f) It has no support for alternate keyboard layouts 1g) it has no support for shifted keys 2) How does one represent release events in modifyOtherKeys?

xterm has a long and convoluted history of coming up with poorly designed hacks that the entire ecosystem has to carry around forever afterwards. Not wanting to support these mis-faetures is an entirely reasonable position.

why does the console (it should be called console, as terminal refers to a setup that was obsolete 30 years ago) not have a proper input line? why does pasting a newline make it run? i should be able to type a command and edit it in a line that is a separate UI element from the text output. there is no compatibility argument here. only 0.001% of programs actually need to do anything other than be run and output text (and just text, not escape characters that do funny stuff). there's no dilemma that you love to imagine where changing it to work this way would cause massive incompatibility problems. we could even just make a new console called dumbtextconsole that works this way

viewing some logs from the shell is annoying as hell because the input goes into the program and once the program exits the shell runs whatever you typed. this is obviously a bad UI design. you will always have this stupid invisible buffer that you have to keep track of in your head the number of times you accidentally typed a letter there. if you ssh or tmux in, then you are more likely to enter bogus characters by accident when mistyping a command to ssh/tmux. the argument that its needed for compatibility is still moot if you only want a console for running commands. you dont need those interactive commands either. those are the most bogus hacky scripts that serve no purpose. i dont need a terminal to edit files either, that can be done with a proper GUI that runs outside the console.

it's also a security vulnerability the way shell input works. since you might paste something with a newline on the end and it will automatically execute. the idea that you should be responsible for what's in your clipboard is just bogus. you are resorting to some ad-hoc philosophy to argue this. if there was simple a proper input line where you pressed enter to run it, this wouldn't be a concern.

that one python shell.. Dreampy does this, no problem. the insane user who thinks it's a thing for some function to hijack random parts of the terminal[1] has his program break, and the rest of stuff just continues to work

this post also answers the "there are no alternatives" hackjobs in this comment chain. clearly there are alternatives, i just stated some, and once you follow this line of thought it actually leads to an entirely different OS (duh, why did i even have to state this, oh yeah, because you're disingenuous hackjobs). the fact that these people have the audacity to claim that UN*X, which is a absolutely highly specific way of designing things, that would never happen in isolation, is the only way to design an OS, proves how big of an issue this is in the software industry.

1. the insanity here being obviously that once you change random attributes about the global shared state, you have to assume other programs don't get the same idea as you and do stuff in conflicting ways

Unfortunately, the IT industry seems to have at some point decided that UNIX and C are somehow fundamental to computing, and the only way forward is to build more and more layers of abstraction on top of it.

The most depressing thing is that even "indie" OSes buy into this garbage (Serenity, Redox, ...). Yes, you get tons of (crappy) portable software that now runs on your platform for free, but at the cost of being stuck with a lowest-common-denominator API.

In the very rare cases where you need to change the indentation of a line, there's == or, if that doesn't work, you can indent a line forth and back with >> and << .

And I understand that accidentally hitting capslock can also be annoying when typing, but that happens so rarely (for me) that it's not an issue, and one could always just disable the capslock key in that case.

What am I missing?

It's strange to me that so many computer keyboards still have fold-out tabs at the back to emulate this. I even saw an old PS/2 keyboard with terraced rows just like a typewriter! But habit is a powerful thing. Pardon the tangent, but we're using an 1870s design whose main constraints were making room for key levers to travel up and down (which is also why we have staggered keys instead of an ortholinear grid). The funny thing is that there were decades more of alternative typewriter keyboard designs (look up the Hammond 1 for an example), but the first commercially successful typewriter, the Sholes and Glidden, is the one that won out in the end.

Military computer joins up with its Soviet counterpart and takes over the world. There may have been some teletypes, but the more memorable output device was the big scrolling line of text.

RESTORE COMMUNICATION -- FROM COLOSSUS -- TO GUARDIAN -- OR ACTION WILL BE TAKEN

And it works for other things, like:

echo "<ctrl-v><esc>c" clears my screen.

(where <ctrl-key> means pressing <ctrl>+key, <esc> means pressing the escape key, etc)

Unless your data happens to contain record, file, unit, group separators... Which is kinda the whole problem; ASCII does not have any proper separation/layering between the data and control characters.