Context : as I mentioned in a previous post, I use a slightly modified qwerty map, where parentheses and brackets are switched. Quite recently, for various reasons, I came to use rxvt-unicode as a terminal emulator.

Although being otherwise very nice, this little program used to suffer from an annoying feature, namely the builtin iso-mode. Actually, it's not the iso-mode itself that is annoying (after all, being able to compose rarely used characters does not hurt) but the fact that it is hard-bound to the control-shift combination. There are at least 3 arguments against this choice :

1. such a sequence is easy to hit by accident
2. anyone who would like to use emacs in console mode is screwed
3. in any case, that feature should be an option

So I am very happy to hear that the default behavior has changed in the latest version, and that iso-mode is now activated only in the rxvt-unicode-ml flavor. I hope Debian will ship version 9.x soon.

Given that, the key handling in rxvt-unicode is still quite strange… Remember that I mentioned the switched brackets/parentheses ? This means that I have to hit shift to compose a bracket. As you may know, the default escape character for telnet (that enables you to close the session at the protocol level, for example) is ^] (that is ctrl-]). No need to say that with my configuration, iso-mode was a real annoyance regarding this…

Still, without iso-mode, the behavior is strange : hitting ^] simply does not work when ] is not where expected (neither does it with rxvt, but xterm is ok). Maybe it's related to my ~/.Xdefaults, but I can't see why :

rxvt-unicode*background: DarkSlateGray
rxvt-unicode*foreground: Wheat
rxvt-unicode*cursorColor: Yellow
rxvt-unicode*font: xft:Dejavu Sans Mono-8
rxvt-unicode*reverseVideo: false
rxvt-unicode*scrollBar: false
rxvt-unicode*saveLines: 5000
rxvt-unicode*reverseWrap: true
rxvt-unicode.geometry: 80x25+20+20
rxvt-unicode*fullCursor: true
rxvt-unicode*scrollTtyOutput: off
rxvt-unicode*scrollKey: on
rxvt-unicode*titleBar: true
rxvt-unicode*color12: #84bdd2

Anyway, I've just accidentally discovered that ^} works ! (I mean, in rxvt-unicode and xterm) As far as I know, this is undocumented feature, but I couldn't care less… I'm at the point where I don't understand the problem, nor the solution. Time to sleep I guess…