[TxMt] Re: escaping characters (in the document)

[Rob McBroom]

On Nov 30, 2006, at 3:52 PM, Jacob Rus wrote:

> Well, the first two of these cases are in some shell scripting  
> language presumably, which probably has its own convention for  
> writing control characters,

No, this is standard terminal emulation stuff (for controlling window  
title, color, etc). Nothing to do with a particular shell.

> and as for the third, while he probably should be using TextMate  
> instead of vim anyway ;), doesn't vim have some ways of recording  
> macros, etc?

Yeah, I agree usually. I think this was some quick and dirty job on a  
remote machine is all. And yes, mapping a command in vim is really  
easy (you can even use strings like `<ESC>` and `<F6>` in the command  
and it will know what you mean) and would have been second nature to  
me a few months ago, but I suppose I've gotten rusty from using some  
other editor.

> In any case, as was already said, control characters really aren't  
> meant for copying and pasting.  They're meant for controlling  
> things.  Unless you're really careful, you could do lots of stuff  
> you don't want to do when you copy/paste control characters.  It's  
> a non-transparent process with potentially dangerous side effects,  
> for which numerous better solutions exist... so, I suggest against it.

I agree, but I never said I wanted to copy and paste these things. I  
said I wanted to "type" and "see" them. Copy/paste was a suggested  
work-around that I agreed might work in some cases. Since it's such a  
bad idea, I won't mention who originally suggested it. ;)

FYI, I think there may be another way to store these things as plain  
text (using something like `\033` to represent escape, for example).  
My wild guesses at syntax haven't been very successful so far, but  
I'm still looking into it. Anyway, thanks for the help.

---
Rob McBroom
<http://www.skurfer.com/>
I didn't "switch" to Apple... my OS did.