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ASCII control characters in my terminal


ASCII control characters in my terminal

Also I use Ctrl+Left Arrow all the time, but that isn’t a control code, instead it sends an ANSI escape sequence ( ctrl-[[1;5D) which is a different thing which we absolutely do not have space for in this post. I have no idea how to make those actually do anything (pressing them does not do anything obvious, and some people have told me what they used to do historically but it’s not clear to me if they have a use in 2024), and a lot of the time in practice they seem to just be passed through to the application anyway so I just labelled Ctrl-R and Ctrl-Y as readline. I’ve used the terminal pretty successfully every day for the last 20 years without knowing literally any of this – I just knew what Ctrl-C, Ctrl-D, Ctrl-Z, Ctrl-R, Ctrl-L did in practice (plus maybe Ctrl-A, Ctrl-E and Ctrl-W) and did not worry about the details for the most part, and that was almost always totally fine except when I was trying to use xterm.js.

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