From: joel@wam.umd.edu (Joel M. Hoffman) Subject: Re: 'Special' keys not working in DOS Emulator Date: Sat, 12 Dec 1992 02:22:50 GMT
In article <1992Dec11.172517.25575@midway.uchicago.edu> ace3@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
>I have been playing with the DOS emulator v 0.4 (kernel version 98.6);
>it's really amazing -- nice work!!
>
> [...]
> none of the special keys generate the
>correct response under the DOS emulator. (A special key is
>Alt-anything, the cursor pad keys and the function keys). All the the
>keys I've tried seem to generate ESC[<letter>. I thought this might be
>caused by running under an xterm so I tried it outside of X and had the
>same response. Looking through the code, it seems that Alt keys and
>such are expected and should work, so what's going on??
>
>I have the US keyboard defined in kernel Makefile and DO NOT define the
>Latin keyboard define in the emulator makefile.
Normally, function keys etc. generate escape sequences. For the DOS
emulator to work, it has to bypass the normal keybaord driver in the
kernel, and get the keys directly. Of course, this means nothing can
be piped to the emulator.
I would recommend adding a function to the kernel (perhaps there
already is one?) to return to true state of the keyboard, and then
modifying the emulator to use that. Of course, the kernel itself uses
Alt-<fn key>, so there would have to be an alternative way of
returning that (for use with WordPerfect, e.g.).
-Joel
(joel@wam.umd.edu)