Is it possible for the terminal to detect ⇧ Shift+Enter↵ or Ctrl+Enter↵ keypresses?
I am trying to configure vim to do key mappings that use these sequences, and while they work fine in gvim, they don't seem to work in any terminal console.
The curious thing is that although Ctrl+Enter↵ is not detected in vim, mapping Enter↵ to Esc maps properly, but then pressing Ctrl+Enter↵ behaves like Enter↵!
Some terminals send <NL> when <C-Enter> is pressed. This is equivalent to sending <C-J>.
To find out what your terminal does with <Shift-Enter>, <Ctrl-Enter> and <Enter>, go to your terminal, type <Ctrl-V> (similar to sykora's suggestion for vim), and type in the sequence you're interested in.
Using gnome-terminal, I get the following:
<Enter> : ^M
<S-Enter> : ^M
<C-Enter> : <NL>
Looking at man ascii indicates that ^M gives the <CR> sequence.
The answer is that it depends on the terminal, and there's an easy way to check.
Gvim runs its own manager for keystroke handling and so can pick up all the various key combinations. Vim is reliant on the specific terminal for passing on the particular keypress, so keyhandling is only as good or varied as the terminal is.
One way you can find out whether you can do what you want to do is to use the key to find out what is inserted. eg Type:
:<C-V><C-Enter>
ie actually type in the combination you want to press after having typed the combination Control-V. After that do the same thing for enter, ie
:<C-V><Enter>
If they yield the same code, then the terminal interprets both key combinations as the same keycode, and you can't bind them without messing with the terminal.
In my terminal (urxvt), Control-Enter, Shift-Enter and Enter (by itself) all produce the ^M character, meaning I can't map one without mapping the other. The same goes for Control-Tab and Control-I, and Control-Space and Control-#
EDIT: Use C-Q instead of C-V for Windows.
Related
Is it possible for the terminal to detect ⇧ Shift+Enter↵ or Ctrl+Enter↵ keypresses?
I am trying to configure vim to do key mappings that use these sequences, and while they work fine in gvim, they don't seem to work in any terminal console.
The curious thing is that although Ctrl+Enter↵ is not detected in vim, mapping Enter↵ to Esc maps properly, but then pressing Ctrl+Enter↵ behaves like Enter↵!
Some terminals send <NL> when <C-Enter> is pressed. This is equivalent to sending <C-J>.
To find out what your terminal does with <Shift-Enter>, <Ctrl-Enter> and <Enter>, go to your terminal, type <Ctrl-V> (similar to sykora's suggestion for vim), and type in the sequence you're interested in.
Using gnome-terminal, I get the following:
<Enter> : ^M
<S-Enter> : ^M
<C-Enter> : <NL>
Looking at man ascii indicates that ^M gives the <CR> sequence.
The answer is that it depends on the terminal, and there's an easy way to check.
Gvim runs its own manager for keystroke handling and so can pick up all the various key combinations. Vim is reliant on the specific terminal for passing on the particular keypress, so keyhandling is only as good or varied as the terminal is.
One way you can find out whether you can do what you want to do is to use the key to find out what is inserted. eg Type:
:<C-V><C-Enter>
ie actually type in the combination you want to press after having typed the combination Control-V. After that do the same thing for enter, ie
:<C-V><Enter>
If they yield the same code, then the terminal interprets both key combinations as the same keycode, and you can't bind them without messing with the terminal.
In my terminal (urxvt), Control-Enter, Shift-Enter and Enter (by itself) all produce the ^M character, meaning I can't map one without mapping the other. The same goes for Control-Tab and Control-I, and Control-Space and Control-#
EDIT: Use C-Q instead of C-V for Windows.
I would like to map Control + F3 with map <c-f3> :w <CR> :make <CR><CR><CR>. When I leave out the Control this works fine. With control from normal command mode insert mode is entered and 1;5R is inserted into the buffer.
When I use a simpler command e.g. map <c-f3> dd this works as expected.
With Shift instead of control I get a similar behavior (1;2R inserted into buffer). What can I do get my mapping right?
Edit: I want the command to be executed from normal command mode. However, vim enters insert mode, which is not desired.
The combination of function keys and modifiers is problematic in terminal Vim; whether this works depends on the terminal.
Check your $TERM value; a wrong one can cause these problems. Also, your termcap database must be correct and complete.
Try out another terminal (gnome-terminal vs. konsole vs. xterm); it may work there.
Alternatively, use GVIM; it doesn't have these problems (but still can't map some other combinations).
If you use varying terminals, it's best to avoid these key combinations, and just use plain <F1..12>, and <Leader>... for the rest.
map defines keystrokes for normal, visual and operation modes. For insert mode you should use imap.
Something like this I believe: imap <c-f3> <esc>:w :make <cr><cr><cr>. <ESC> puts the Vim to normal mode.
:he :key-mapping for explaining.
I'm running Vim on a gnome terminal. But the alt key mappings are not working. For example:
:imap <A-i> <Esc>
It works fine in GVim. But when I run the same command with Vim in the gnome terminal it does nothing.
I'm using Windows 7, The problem is with the terminal, right?
The problem
There are two ways for a terminal emulator to send an Alt key (usually called a Meta key as actual terminals didn't have Alt). It can either send 8 bit characters and set the high bit when Alt is used, or it can use escape sequences, sending Alt-a as <Esc>a. Vim expects to see the 8 bit encoding rather than the escape sequence.
Some terminal emulators such as xterm can be set to use either mode, but Gnome terminal doesn't offer any such setting. To be honest in these days of Unicode editing, the 8-bit encoding is not such a good idea anyway. But escape sequences are not problem free either; they offer no way of distinguishing between <Esc>j meaning Alt-j vs pressing Esc followed by j.
In earlier terminal use, typing Escj was another way to send a Meta on a keyboard without a Meta key, but this doesn't fit well with vi's use of Esc to leave insert mode.
The solution
It is possible to work around this by configuring vim to map the escape sequences to their Alt combinations.
Add this to your .vimrc:
let c='a'
while c <= 'z'
exec "set <A-".c.">=\e".c
exec "imap \e".c." <A-".c.">"
let c = nr2char(1+char2nr(c))
endw
set timeout ttimeoutlen=50
Alt-letter will now be recognised by vi in a terminal as well as by gvim. The timeout settings are used to work around the ambiguity with escape sequences. Esc and j sent within 50ms will be mapped to <A-j>, greater than 50ms will count as separate keys. That should be enough time to distinguish between Meta encoding and hitting two keys.
If you don't like having timout set, which times out for other mapped key sequences (after a second by default), then you can use ttimeout instead. ttimeout applies only to key codes and not other mappings.
set ttimeout ttimeoutlen=50
For Gnome-terminal, use the following instead:
imap ^[i <Esc>
^[i should be typed by pressing Ctrl-v Alt-i
Attention: You need to yank and put in Vim when you want to copy it elsewhere. If you just copy the mapping in an editor like gedit, the mapping will probably be broken.
EDIT here is an example which makes Alt-k add an empty line above the cursor, and Alt-j add an empty line after the current line.
" Alt-j/k to add a blank line
if has('gui_running')
" the following two lines do not work in vim, but work in Gvim
nnoremap <silent><A-j> :set paste<CR>m`o<Esc>``:set nopaste<CR>
nnoremap <silent><A-k> :set paste<CR>m`O<Esc>``:set nopaste<CR>
else
" these two work in vim
" shrtcut with alt key: press Ctrl-v then Alt-k
" ATTENTION: the following two lines should not be
" edited under other editors like gedit. ^[k and ^[j will be broken!
nnoremap ^[k :set paste<CR>m`O<Esc>``:set nopaste<CR>
nnoremap ^[j :set paste<CR>m`o<Esc>``:set nopaste<CR>
endif
Try
<m-i>
Or, if typing alti inserts a character (like in my case, it inserts a carret: ˆ) just map to that character:
:inoremap ˆ <esc>
Be careful, because this one wouldn't work (at least in my system, MacOS 10.6). The caret waits for a letter, because it's not exactly a caret, it is a circumflex.
It may be that the shortcuts are actually from the Gnome Desktop. Try looking at the Gnome Keyboard Shortcuts tool (System menu, Preferences, Keyboard Shortcuts), which lets you view and modify the shortcuts defined on Gnome Desktop. If the key combination is assigned to a function on Gnome Desktop, then remove it and then that key combo should filter down to Vim properly.
Or you may be right that it is a problem of the terminal. Not all terminals support all key combos. Your problem may be the one described in the Vim help docs at :h map-alt-keys. The docs provide a workaround, but not a very good one.
The same thing happens to me. I searched on Google with "gnome terminal alt key", and found that someone asked almost the same question: "How to disable the alt-hotkey behavior on gnome terminal?" in the first link found. (The second link is just this question)
So, maybe you can try that:
Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts, and uncheck "Enable menu access keys"
Take a look at section 1.10 of http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/map.html. It seems to indicate that gnome-terminal automatically escapes the Alt modifier, so that it doesn't switch the byte sent in the way that Vim is expecting. The document seems to indicate that there isn't really a way around this except for using a different terminal (such as xterm).
This is certainly frustrating because so far as I can tell Linux machines are also incapable of using the D (Mac's Command or Linux's Super) bindings, so at least as far as the terminal goes, we are limited to Shift and Ctrl modifiers, which is frustrating if we want to ensure that we can use all the commands we use in Gvim on terminal Vim (at least without switching terminals, towards which I'm perhaps overly stubborn - gnome-terminal is just so much prettier). I've been looking for a way around this but have been unable to find anything.
I'm running Vim on a gnome terminal. But the alt key mappings are not working. For example:
:imap <A-i> <Esc>
It works fine in GVim. But when I run the same command with Vim in the gnome terminal it does nothing.
I'm using Windows 7, The problem is with the terminal, right?
The problem
There are two ways for a terminal emulator to send an Alt key (usually called a Meta key as actual terminals didn't have Alt). It can either send 8 bit characters and set the high bit when Alt is used, or it can use escape sequences, sending Alt-a as <Esc>a. Vim expects to see the 8 bit encoding rather than the escape sequence.
Some terminal emulators such as xterm can be set to use either mode, but Gnome terminal doesn't offer any such setting. To be honest in these days of Unicode editing, the 8-bit encoding is not such a good idea anyway. But escape sequences are not problem free either; they offer no way of distinguishing between <Esc>j meaning Alt-j vs pressing Esc followed by j.
In earlier terminal use, typing Escj was another way to send a Meta on a keyboard without a Meta key, but this doesn't fit well with vi's use of Esc to leave insert mode.
The solution
It is possible to work around this by configuring vim to map the escape sequences to their Alt combinations.
Add this to your .vimrc:
let c='a'
while c <= 'z'
exec "set <A-".c.">=\e".c
exec "imap \e".c." <A-".c.">"
let c = nr2char(1+char2nr(c))
endw
set timeout ttimeoutlen=50
Alt-letter will now be recognised by vi in a terminal as well as by gvim. The timeout settings are used to work around the ambiguity with escape sequences. Esc and j sent within 50ms will be mapped to <A-j>, greater than 50ms will count as separate keys. That should be enough time to distinguish between Meta encoding and hitting two keys.
If you don't like having timout set, which times out for other mapped key sequences (after a second by default), then you can use ttimeout instead. ttimeout applies only to key codes and not other mappings.
set ttimeout ttimeoutlen=50
For Gnome-terminal, use the following instead:
imap ^[i <Esc>
^[i should be typed by pressing Ctrl-v Alt-i
Attention: You need to yank and put in Vim when you want to copy it elsewhere. If you just copy the mapping in an editor like gedit, the mapping will probably be broken.
EDIT here is an example which makes Alt-k add an empty line above the cursor, and Alt-j add an empty line after the current line.
" Alt-j/k to add a blank line
if has('gui_running')
" the following two lines do not work in vim, but work in Gvim
nnoremap <silent><A-j> :set paste<CR>m`o<Esc>``:set nopaste<CR>
nnoremap <silent><A-k> :set paste<CR>m`O<Esc>``:set nopaste<CR>
else
" these two work in vim
" shrtcut with alt key: press Ctrl-v then Alt-k
" ATTENTION: the following two lines should not be
" edited under other editors like gedit. ^[k and ^[j will be broken!
nnoremap ^[k :set paste<CR>m`O<Esc>``:set nopaste<CR>
nnoremap ^[j :set paste<CR>m`o<Esc>``:set nopaste<CR>
endif
Try
<m-i>
Or, if typing alti inserts a character (like in my case, it inserts a carret: ˆ) just map to that character:
:inoremap ˆ <esc>
Be careful, because this one wouldn't work (at least in my system, MacOS 10.6). The caret waits for a letter, because it's not exactly a caret, it is a circumflex.
It may be that the shortcuts are actually from the Gnome Desktop. Try looking at the Gnome Keyboard Shortcuts tool (System menu, Preferences, Keyboard Shortcuts), which lets you view and modify the shortcuts defined on Gnome Desktop. If the key combination is assigned to a function on Gnome Desktop, then remove it and then that key combo should filter down to Vim properly.
Or you may be right that it is a problem of the terminal. Not all terminals support all key combos. Your problem may be the one described in the Vim help docs at :h map-alt-keys. The docs provide a workaround, but not a very good one.
The same thing happens to me. I searched on Google with "gnome terminal alt key", and found that someone asked almost the same question: "How to disable the alt-hotkey behavior on gnome terminal?" in the first link found. (The second link is just this question)
So, maybe you can try that:
Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts, and uncheck "Enable menu access keys"
Take a look at section 1.10 of http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/map.html. It seems to indicate that gnome-terminal automatically escapes the Alt modifier, so that it doesn't switch the byte sent in the way that Vim is expecting. The document seems to indicate that there isn't really a way around this except for using a different terminal (such as xterm).
This is certainly frustrating because so far as I can tell Linux machines are also incapable of using the D (Mac's Command or Linux's Super) bindings, so at least as far as the terminal goes, we are limited to Shift and Ctrl modifiers, which is frustrating if we want to ensure that we can use all the commands we use in Gvim on terminal Vim (at least without switching terminals, towards which I'm perhaps overly stubborn - gnome-terminal is just so much prettier). I've been looking for a way around this but have been unable to find anything.
In a terminal, one cannot distinguish Ctrl+A and Ctrl+Shift+A as they both emit the same key code, so I can see why Vim can't do it. But gVim, being an X application, can differentiate Ctrl+A and Ctrl+Shift+A. Is there any way to map those two things differently?
For starters, I'd like to do something like the following: Make "paste from clipboard" work like Gnome terminal, while keeping Ctrl+V to the visual mode.
:nmap <C-S-V> "+gP
Gvim doesn't do it because vim cannot do it (under normal circumstances). Sorry, but that's just how it is.
However...
Some terminals (e.g., xterm and iterm2) can be configured to send an arbitrary escape sequence for any combination of keys.
For example, add the following to .Xresources for xterm to send <Esc>[65;5u for CtrlShiftA. You can then map that in Vim to <C-S-a>. (65 is the decimal Unicode value for shift-a and 5 is the bit for the ctrl modifier. The u in this case stands for "unicode".)
! .Xresources
XTerm*vt100.translations: #override Ctrl ~Meta Shift <Key>a: string(0x1b) string("[65;5u")
iTerm and [u]rxvt can also be configured to do this (examples not provided).
More info: http://www.leonerd.org.uk/hacks/fixterms/
As already pointed out, there are no ways to map <C-S-A> differently from <C-A>.
However, using tools like autokey (for linux & windows) or autohotkey (for windows), you can remap <C-S-A> to send a different key-stroke(s) for specific applications.
e.g. On my system, I have this setting in autokey:
$ cat ~/.config/autokey/data/gnome-terminal/ctrlshifta-gnome-terminal.py
#ctrl+shift+a sends '<S-F1>a'
keyboard.send_keys("<shift>+<f1>a") # Note that `f` in `f1` needs to be in lower case.
Assign it these properties:
keyboard-shortcut as ctrl+shift+a
window class: gnome-terminal-server.Gnome-terminal
Then your ~/.vimrc can create mapping for <S-F1>a to do whatever you want.
Notes:
I have used <S-F1> as kind of leader key for detecting <C-S>. This was because my terminal did not accept <F13>-<F37> etc keys. If your application supports it, (gvim does I think) using those keys is recommended.
I mainly vim in gnome-terminal. So I used window class = gnome-terminal-server.Gnome-terminal as filter. Modify it to use gvim if you want. autokey supports a button for capturing any other window's properties like class/title.
Due to the way that the keyboard input is handled internally, this unfortunately isn't generally possible today, even in GVIM. Some key combinations, like Ctrl + non-alphabetic cannot be mapped, and Ctrl + letter vs. Ctrl + Shift + letter cannot be distinguished. (Unless your terminal sends a distinct termcap code for it, which most don't.) In insert or command-line mode, try typing the key combination. If nothing happens / is inserted, you cannot use that key combination. This also applies to <Tab> / <C-I>, <CR> / <C-M> / <Esc> / <C-[> etc. (Only exception is <BS> / <C-H>.) This is a known pain point, and the subject of various discussions on vim_dev and the #vim IRC channel.
Some people (foremost Paul LeoNerd Evans) want to fix that (even for console Vim in terminals that support this), and have floated various proposals, cp. http://groups.google.com/group/vim_dev/browse_thread/thread/626e83fa4588b32a/bfbcb22f37a8a1f8
But as of today, no patches or volunteers have yet come forward, though many have expressed a desire to have this in a future Vim release.
If what bothers you is loosing existing C-V functionality, you can use C-Q instead. See, :help CTRL-V-alternative.
NeoVim now offers this functionality for both its terminal and gui clients. See :h nvim-features-new
As you've noted, you get the same keycode. So the only way to distinguish them is to check the state of the Shift key in your event handling function. Of course, if you have more than 0.5 second delay between keypress and processing, you'll miss some hits.
Most terminal emulators treat control plus shift simply as control by default. Instead, you usually map those key combinations to an escape sequence and listen to that inside the terminal application.
Step 1: Configure your terminal emulator to bind Ctrl+Shift+A to the sequence Esc,A.
Your terminal emulator is the program that shows the actual window of the terminal. When accessing a server via SSH, the terminal emulator is a program on your local machine. Binding keys works differently in different terminal emulators. For example:
For urxvt, add URxvt.keysym.Control-Shift-A: \033A to the ~/.Xresources configuration file and reload it with xrdb ~/.Xresources.
For iTerm2, open Preferences -> Keys, add an entry, and bind Ctrl+Shift+A to the action "Send Escape Sequence" and type A into the field below.
Step 2: Bind Esc,A to a command in Vim.
Add the key mapping to your ~/.vimrc configuration and reload it with :source ~/.vimrc:
nnoremap <esc>a your command here