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.