Defining function keys

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

In article <9991 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
>In article <1869 at umbc3.UMBC.EDU> rostamia at umbc3.UMBC.EDU (Rouben Rostamian) writes:
>>Is there a way to define function keys to execute certain commands in UNIX?
>
>Not normally, because all the UNIX terminal handler sees is a sequence of
>ASCII codes starting with ESC, and it cannot assume that the sender of
>those codes conforms to X3.64.

If you have a terminal whose function keys can be bound to user-specifiable
strings, there is no problem.  Ann Arbor Ambassadors come to mind, there
must be lots of others.  I'm typing this on a Sun-3/50, and I have my
function keys bound to some strings I find useful.

Last year a couple of programs were posted to comp.sources.unix which
would take over terminal I/O and let you run a program underneath them;
one was called ILE, the other I forget the name of.  You could easily
adapt ILE to do function key mapping.