Solving keyboard related problems with XTERM and GNU Midnight Commander (and other programs as well). Xterm brings a handful of problems with input keys and their translations. Some of these problems include xterm's failure to make a difference between shifted and not shifted function keys (many keyboards do not have more than 10 or 12 function keys, so it is useful to generate higher function keys (11 - 20) by pressing Shift and function key - 10 (e.g. Shift+F3 is F13). Xterm also doesn't send Alt+character and Meta+character as something other than plain character. Also, home key does not work on most systems. And keypad operator characters (+, -, /, *) send different sequences than normal +, -, /, * (or sometimes do not send anything). Please note that if you want to use the Alt key on an XTerm, you have to make sure you use: XTerm*eightBitInput: false Otherwise, you will just get accented keys. Fortunately this can be solved, since xterm is written on top of the X Toolkit Intrinsics, which has a built-in feature of event translation tables that can be specified using X resources. This doesn't apply to rxvt, where the only solution to this problem would be patching rxvt's sources and recompiling. So from now on, we are speaking only about xterm (and its modifications, like color_xterm and ansi_xterm). Xterm brings two new Xt widgets (if you don't know what they are it doesn't matter), vt100 and tek4014 (these are used for the terminal display in vt100 and tektronics mode). The translation table is specified in *vt100.translations and *tek4014.translations resources. You can see a sample in xterm.ad file in this directory. If you want to install these translations, bear in mind that you have to keep your terminfo and termcap in sync with these. So if you install xterm.ad, you have to install xterm.ti and xterm.tcap (or do necessary changes yourself). xterm.ad has to be loaded into the Xrm (X resource manager), either by xterm itself or by xrdb utility. There are many places you may want to install it to; the decision is yours. Preferably it should go to your personal $HOME/.Xdefaults file (if you have any). This file is automatically loaded using xrdb whenever you start the X server (it is done by startx and openwin scripts). Another possibility is to put this into $X11ROOT/lib/X11/app-defaults/XTerm or wherever your app-defaults file of xterm is and whatever is its name (sometimes it will have to be XTerm-ansi, XTerm-color etc.) Or you can put this anywhere and call xrdb xterm.ad from any script you run on X11 startup. xterm.ti (terminfo database source) is installed by running `tic xterm.ti'. tic will compile it and place it into your TERMINFO directory. xterm.tcap is the xterm (and xterm-color) termcap entry. It is based on the newest termcap database from http://www.ccil.org/~esr/ncurses.html, but contains a bunch of changes to make all the above mentioned keys work. Even if mc is compiled so that it uses terminfo, you need to install the termcap entry so that other programs which use termcap will behave correctly. You have to edit your /etc/termcap and replace xterm and xterm-color entries with those from xterm.tcap. The xterm.ad translation table contains many items (some of them may be unnecessary) but are included only to make it work on all different xterms (xterm terminfo and termcap databases have different sequences for the same keys in every different database, so xterm.ad works as a stardard to make xterm.ti and termcap happy). If you find that xterm works well even if you delete some lines from the translations, feel free to do it. By default, Alt+character keys received by mc are generated in xterm.ad by Alt modifier plus the key. On some systems, you may want to change this to the Meta modifier (e.g. if the Alt modifier is missing). You do it by replacing a letter s at the beginning of table lines with letter m. And what you might want to know, if you are going to change anything, is: Each line looks like modifierskeyname: string("something") \n\ where modifiers can be: a for alt m for meta c for control button1 (2, 3) for mouse buttons. The string is generated whenever the named key is pressed while the modifiers are in a state matching the specification. Naming a modifier specifies that the modifier must be pressed. A ~ in front of a modifier name specifies that the modifier must NOT be pressed. If the set of modifiers is preceded by !, unmentioned modifiers must not be pressed; otherwise their state is ignored. After you specify a name of the key (if you don't know a canonical name of any key, see $X11ROOT/include/X11/keysymdef.h (keynames are the names there without leading XK_). Then there can be any sequence of string statements which send the string to the tty line, as if the user typed that sequence of characters. If it has the form string(0xXX), where X's are hexadecimal digits, then the ascii character of that value is sent rather than 0xXX. This is a subset of all the translation table features. If you want a complete reference, see xterm(1) and X Toolkit Intrinsics manual Appendix B. Please, if you find any problems or errors in this stuff, let me know by e-mail to mc-devel@gnome.org.