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Comment by blueflow | Hacker News Reader

> and the overloading of ESC for the actual ESC key

What else was the ESC key made for if not the control code?

> I've thought for a while that I should implement an extremely reduced set of escape sequences which use a non-ESC character (maybe SOH or something) for control sequences and key encoding. A minimal set -- color / cursor position / save-screen / query-size -- whatever it takes to make vim/emacs + tmux/screen work, and call it a day.

I did that as a 8086 boot sector and it would render tmux with unicode characters stripped. You need surprisingly few sequences.

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On a modern PC, Esc key is Esc key... whatever the application wants to use it for (99% time, cancel some UI operation).

To me it's insane that one of the most used key command has a 1 second delay in the terminal.

Or that typically Esc + some function/arrow key results in some junk.

> one of the most used key command

Found the vim user! The vast, _vast_ majority of Unix command-line or text-based programs do not use the Esc key because they were not written with a particular terminal or keyboard layout in mind. (Unlike vim.)

But for whatever it's worth, I use vim every day and I notice no 1 second delay when switching modes with the Esc key, so perhaps this is something you can configure in your terminal.

  > I notice no 1 second delay when switching modes with the Esc key, so perhaps 
  > this is something you can configure in your terminal.

This is configurable in Vim. ttimeoutlen, timeoutlen, and noesckeys are pertinent. tmux et al may also need tweaking.

Ctrl + [ instead of Esc gets one back into normal mode, with no delay Takes a while getting used to it (I still haven't)

What does `Ctrl + [` send to the terminal for you if not esc? In my experience these are always the same, so Vim shouldn't be able to tell the difference unless it's a GUI-integrated version like gVim.

Try to run `xxd` and then press Ctrl-V and either Ctrl+[ or Esc, then Enter and Ctrl+D. Typical terminal setups will show the same codes both times (1b0a for esc and \n).

Alt+Space (or Alt+J Alt+K Alt+B to go up, down, left one word from current position after returning to normal mode) is what I often do which should work universally.

If you type in junk into the keyboard, junk is what you get on the screen. I see the fault with the developers that overload the keys for existing control characters with a different meaning.

> whatever the application wants to use it for

With the application being a terminal emulator, that is emitting an ESC character.

Is your terminal emulator waiting for a second input before sending Esc? That’s not a common behavior AFAIK.

No, its waiting for input after sending escape. Escape + character is how you reach the C1 control codes, with CSI and OSC (ESC + '[' and ESC + ']') being popular ones (both referred to in the posted article). This is relevant for keyboard input (as contrasted to output-only) since some codes for special keys (like arrow keys) start with CSI.

Edit: You asked about the terminal emulator, but its the console application that has to do the wait.

Are you using something like tmux: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/608142/whats-the-ef...

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