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.) The easiest way to see the code ne
uses for a given
key is by using the KeyCode command. It prompts you to press a
key, then reports the code for that key on the status bar.
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> or <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 associate 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.