On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 04:31:08PM +0200, Rene Kita wrote: > On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 03:54:12PM +0200, Walter Alejandro Iglesias wrote: > > Besides, giving the user an option to choose any key binding to > > abort is difficult to accomplish for the way this special binding was > > hardcoded in mutt. It's not *my approach*, is the way mutt has been > > designed and coded. I didn't investigate it enough but I remember > > reading (please correct me if I'm wrong) that it's ncurses what narrows > > the choice with this particular action. Notice that it's not only mutt, > > all ncurses applications are flexible in letting you choose key bindings > > for everything except for abort. > > OK, I'm not really familiar with this topic. I just wanted to start a > discussion and that was something that could be a reason to not pick a > patch. I'm aware that such changes in old code are often more > complicated than expected. >
I'm no expert, I'm less familiar than you. :-) If you are a C expert perhaps you could start reading meta(3) or getch(3) to find out how curses deal with key modifiers. Anyways, there is a basic consideration that many people fail to see. Things are so complicated nowadays that blind us to see the obvious. The inconvenience is that when you decide to use Esc as a modifier you don't longer can use it to abort the action. Vi editor, since its modal, in command mode lets you use the whole keyboard to run commands, with emacs to compensate the lack of available keys for that purpose they resourced to use Esc key as a modifier. To meta or not to meta, that is the question. :-) -- Walter
