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5.1 Key Bindings

ne allows you to associate any keystroke with any command. To accomplish this task, you have to create a (possibly UTf-8) file named .keys in your home directory, or in ~/.ne. You can change the default name (possibly specifying a complete path) using the --keys argument (see Arguments).

The format of the file is very simple: each line starting with the 'KEY' sequence of capital characters is considered the description of a key binding. All other lines are considered comments. The format of a key binding description is

     KEY hexcode command

The hexcode value is the ascii code of the keystroke. (For special keys such as <Insert> or function keys, you should take a look at the file default.keys that comes with ne's distribution: it contains a complete, commented definition of ne's standard bindings that you can modify with a trial-and-error approach.) You can write just the hexadecimal digits, nothing else is necessary (but a prefixing '0x' is tolerated). For instance,

     KEY 1 MoveSOL

binds to <Control>-A the action of moving to the start of a line, while

     KEY 101 LineUp

binds to the “cursor-up” key the action of moving the cursor one line up.

command can be any ne command, including Escape (which allows reconfiguring the menu activator) and Macro, which allows binding complex sequences of actions to a single keystroke. The binding of a macro is very fast because on the first call the macro is cached in memory. See Macro.

Note that you cannot ever redefine <Return> and <Escape>. This is a basic issue—however brain damaged is the current configuration, you will always be able to exploit fully the menus and the command line.

Besides the “standard” combinations (e.g., <Control>-letter), it possible to program combinations based on the <Meta> key (a.k.a. <Alt>). The situation in this case is a bit more involved, because depending on the terminal emulator you are using, the effect of the <Meta> key can be widely different. For instance, xterm raises the eighth bit of a character, so, for instance,

     KEY 81 MoveSOF

binds <Control>-<Meta>-a to the action of moving to the start of the document. However, gnome-terminal will emit the character of ASCII code 1 prefixed with ESC instead. To handle this case, ne provides codes from 180 on for simulated <Meta> sequences: for instance,

     KEY 181 MoveSOF

binds the abovementioned sequence to the same action as before. In general, the code 180+x corresponds to the sequence ESC followed by the ASCII character of code x. Note that some of these sequences may be disabled, if they conflict with existing sequences of your terminal (for instance, ESC followed by 'O' is always disabled because it prefixes several built-in keyboard sequences).

As a final note, we remark that typing <Meta>-a on gnome-terminal will produce an ESC followed by 'a'. Since it is obviously easier to press just <Meta> rather than <Meta> and <Control> at the same time, it is a good idea to associated the same sequence also to this combination, using

     KEY 1E1 MoveSOF

Moreover, this setting provides the user with a second choice: one can press <Escape> followed by a letter instead of using modifiers.

This is the approach used by default in ne: this way, <Control> with <Meta> plus a letter should always work, and <Meta> should work sometimes (of course, if you're sure to use always the same kind of emulator you can bind more features). Again, the best place to look at it's default.keys.

The key binding file is parsed at startup. If something does not work, ne exits displaying an error message. If you want ne to skip parsing the key binding file (for instance, to correct the broken file), just give ne the --no-config argument. See Arguments.