From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030703 Description of problem: I'm (once again) busy trying to make all the x terminal emulators behave identical. One of the problems is that xterm, gnome-terminal and konsole behave different for cursor and/or function keys with modifiers (alt, ctrl, shift) Short story: The attached patch brings xterm fully-inline with gnome-terminal and partial inline with konsole, the rest needs to be fixed in konsole, I know what I'm doing so just apply it :) Read below for the long story: For the function keys gnome-terminal and konsole seem te agree on how the modifer keys should be reported to the application, xterm also has identical behaviour once you remove the shift + function key bindings override from the XTerm app-defaults resource file. With these removed the only difference between the 3 term. emulators is that xterm seems to ignore the alt modifier. The attached patch for the XTerm app-defaults file removes the shift F-key bindings and adds alt F-key bindings mimicking gnome-terminal and konsole with this patch applied the F-key behaviour for all 3 terminals is identical. The cursor keys are a different story, xterm and gnome-terminal both have different ways of reporting these to the application whereas konsole just ignores them. The attached patch makes xterms behaviour identical to gnome-terminal, because: -I think gnome-terminals way is technically better -gnome-terminal is the default terminal in a default RH setup, so I would rather not touch it -some applications already expect the gnome-terminal way of reporting mod-keys. Try this for example: -start gnome-terminal (with just plain bash) -type "touch aap noot mies" (and do not press enter!) -use ctrl-left and ctrl-right to walk through the words on the cli -now try the same in xterm.
Created attachment 93107 [details] patch bringing xterm inline with gnome-terminal
I won't make this change to Red Hat xterm, because xterm users expect xterm to work the way it always has by default. Changing that default on a whim only stands to make all existing xterm users upset who are used to it working the way it does now, and then be upset with Red Hat for changing the default behaviour. However, if the change is made by XFree86.org themselves or the xterm maintainer, that is a different story, as it is not then a local Red Hat modification. Please make xterm enhancement requests such as this directly to the upstream xterm author Thomas Dickey. The easiest way to do this is to file a RFE in XFree86.org bugzilla located at http://bugs.xfree86.org If your enhancement is accepted by XFree86.org into CVS it will appear in a future release of Red Hat Linux when XFree86 is updated.
Perhaps this bug should be reopened, it is currently being discussed under bug 122815 (where al these bugs seem to be coming together :) Thomas Dickey himself is suggesting in this bug that atleast the alternate (and for the current state of affairs wrong) bindings for shift-F1-F10 should be dropped.
The choicen resolution for bug 122815, combined with the current xterm package fixes this, so the resolution could be changed to next release.