What is the gnome-terminal ANSI escape sequence for “CTRL + arrow/s”?

Question

I am trying to configure my bash ~/.inputrc to these settings
(Note: ←, → mean the left and right arrow keys)

Currently I have this in my ~/.inputrc and it doesn't work. Ctrl + arrow produces nothing.

"\eC-5C":forward-word
"\eC-5D":backward-word

I'm sure my escape sequence is wrong.
What are the correct escape sequences for the Ctrl + arrow combinations?

Thomas Dickey · Accepted Answer · 2016-02-14 01:00:15Z

14

Gnome-terminal (more properly VTE) imitates some version of xterm's escape sequences. How closely it does this, depends on the version of VTE.

The relevant xterm documentation is in the PC-Style Function Keys section of XTerm Control Sequences.

What you are looking for is a string like \e[1;5D (for control left-arrow), where the 5 denotes the control modifier.

In ncurses, you can see these strings using infocmp -x, as the values for kUP5, kDN5, kLFT5 and kRIT5. For example:

    kDN5=\E[1;5B,
    kLFT5=\E[1;5D,
    kRIT5=\E[1;5C,        
    kUP5=\E[1;5A,

answered Feb 14 '16 at 0:54

Thomas Dickey

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thanks for response and link to resources. This solved the problem for me! – the_velour_fog Feb 14 '16 at 1:00

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user79743user79743 · Accepted Answer · 2016-02-14 01:30:43Z

19

The simplest way to find what are the codes of a key sequence is to use ctrl - v.

So, you type ctrl V and ctrl → to get:

^[[1;5C

Which is a way to write ESC[1;5C or \e[1;5C.

answered Feb 14 '16 at 1:30

user79743

wow, cool. do you know if that an intended feature of gnome-terminal, or is it something that was discovered by accident? – the_velour_fog Feb 14 '16 at 1:35
Both zsh (bindkey|grep 'quoted-insert') and bash (bind -p|grep 'quoted-insert') have a key binding to output the key codes set to <c-v>. – kba Feb 14 '16 at 1:51
1

For what it's worth, Ctrl-V performs the same function in Vim's Insert and Command modes. – joeytwiddle Feb 14 '16 at 16:03
4

@the_velour_fog Ctrl+V meaning “insert the next character instead of interpreting it as a terminal command” dates back from the early days of Unix. It's a feature of the kernel's command line processing that's been imitated by more sophisticated input systems such as bash, zsh, vi, ... – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Feb 14 '16 at 21:22
1

@kba For the record, they're not the only ones. Bash's is actually provided by the GNU Readline library it depends on, which also binds it to <c-q> to match Emacs keybind it's copying. Zsh also binds it to both <c-v> and <c-q> but only if you enable Vim mode, ironically enough. Readline is also used by other things like Python's import rlcompleter enhancement. (Sources: tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/readline/readline.html#SEC9 and man zshzle) – ssokolow Nov 2 '19 at 7:58

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