#67 Add eightBitInput option

[Anonymous]

It would be nice to have an option like Xterm's "eightBitInput".

In particular, I would like to be able to use Alt keymaps in vim running in RoxTerm. Due to the way RoxTerm handles Alt key combinations, Alt keybinds don't work by default. There is a work around here:

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Get_Alt_key_to_work_in_terminal

However, with this solution, when I press ESC to go into normal mode, vim waits for the second character in an Alt key mapping. So if I had a keybind for <alt-j>, and I press <esc> from insert mode and then press j to move down a line, vim would instead execute the <alt-j> key map and stay in insert mode. </alt-j></esc></alt-j>

[Egmont Koblinger]

If I may chime in:

I understand the issue, and others are trying to address it (and much more), see e.g. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=754347, unfortunately with not much success. I'd really love to see a well designed approach getting widely adopted across terminals and apps.

Breaking the ability to enter (or paste) non-ASCII letters is however, in my opinion, a big fat no-go, even as a configuration option. It just has to work, no matter what. Even English-speaking people often face such characters, e.g. fancy quote marks, long dashes etc. 8-bit input is clearly a legacy, pre-UTF-8 design and it's time to bury it and move forward for something Unicode-compatible.

xterm is the standard emulator that aims to carry all this legacy cr@p; vte tries to be more modern and go with the current trends or whatever makes sense in 2015 and drop the obsolete stuff that made sense decades ago.

Quoting from the link by the original reporter: "programs without accurate timers break unexpectedly and often randomly, such as vim." Even with eightBitInput, the arrow keys still send a sequence that begins with the Esc character. If vi and clones decide to handle two sequences that are prefixes of each other differently (which is a terrible idea to begin with), they should at least get it right (as much as possible; it's never possible to get it right perfectly). "Neovim can be configured without any breakage, as can tmux." I'm quite certain I could break them, but I easily believe they are more robust than vim – so why not go ahead and improve vim? After all, that's what "im" in its name stands for. :)

Until a new standard is implemented, the clean solution could be to configure vim so that pressing the Escape button twice results in the action that's normally achieved by a single Escape. That's how pretty much all other terminal applications work, due to Escape meaning something else than in graphical apps. Instead of 8-bit input, the very first step towards a new standard could be a mode where pressing the Esc key of the keyboard produces two escape bytes. This mode would be, of course, selected by the running application (via output escape sequences), not by the terminal's user.

[Tony Houghton]

I think this is mainly a vte issue, and all roxterm can do is enable some feature in vte if and when it gets implemented.