also does anyone have any tips / gotchas to share about using the `Alt` key in the terminal? I've really avoided using Alt completely because I don't get it but I know people do use it. My impression is that Alt can either be mapped to `ESC` or do `0b1000000 | $CHAR` and there being 2 different options seems very confusing

is the safest thing to do to set Alt to ESC? what's the deal?

@b0rk nothing useful, just an anecdote: I eventually gave up on using the Alt/Command key as the Emacs "Meta" key because every computer I sat down at seemed to map it to something different.

So I retrained my fingers to use the Escape key as a prefix for Emacs Meta, rather than Alt/Command/Option/Windows/whatever the system I was sitting at wanted to use as a chord.

I'd go back, but I feel like there's a termcap out there just waiting to do me wrong.

@danlyke that is useful actually thanks

@b0rk I don't know any alt-shortcuts that apply to the terminal. Are there some? My gut reaction was to alt-tab, but obviously that's handled by the DE.

@danielittlewood I know readline has a bunch of Alt+ keyboard shortcuts (https://gist.github.com/jottr/a2351377b7584abf100b), and I think some people have mentioned on here that they use alt+1 in some command line IRC clients

I personally haven't used any of them though

@b0rk For me, "alt" and "terminal" don't belong in the same ... sphere. I tend not to rely on anything beyond basic VT220 capabilities, and I'm not sure that an Alt key had been invented back then.

@b0rk Related thread: https://mastodon.social/@sarahjamielewis/113496916541065740

@rvedotrc yea even though I'm actually very into a lot of "new" terminal features I still feel highly suspicious of the Alt key in the terminal context

@rvedotrc @b0rk they had a Gold Key, though, and so many VT emulators today fail to emulate that effectively 🤨

@WiteWulf @b0rk

My favourite story about terminals:

In my first ever software job, as the new hire, they didn't have a PC for me. All I got, at least to start with, was a dumb green screen terminal.

Some time into my time in that job, the workload was annoyingly light, so I had time to explore a bit, and code random things. This being the mid 1990s, random dot stereograms aka "Magic Eye" pictures were all the rage. So, I wrote a shell script (where the shell was DCL running on a VMS machine) to generate such an image on my dumb terminal. I think the scene was just a few basic geometric shapes: circle, square, rectangle, with various Z-values.

It wasn't fast, but it worked! However, when I later got a PC with terminal emulation software, the emulator couldn't handle it. Boo!

@b0rk What tips? Just use distro setup, it should work. Nowadays it would usually be "esc, char", but... That really depends on your terminal. echo $TERM, man termcap, man terminfo, man curses, I guess? :-)