🚀 go-pugleaf

Key mapping is a little strange, due to the way X works. For various
technical reasons (which I can provide for those interested), it's not
feasible to provide direct access to the KeySyms of X. For instance,
if you press PgDn on a Sparc keyboard, X reports the PageDown KeySym
to Epoch, which doesn't correspond to any ASCII key.

GNU Emacs deals with this by using internal, hardwired mappings. For
Suns, the cursor keys are mapped into the standard cursor movement
keys (do a global-set-key on ^P and then see what the up arrow does).
Other X KeySyms are mapped into the ESC xxxz (xxx~ for non-Suns)
sequences, presumably because of the way VT100's worked. This is the
default in Epoch, for compatability reasons. However, if this annoys
you as much as it annoys me, you can turn it off by setting the
variable epoch::function-key-mapping to nil.

The X window system provides the ability to have particular KeySyms
generate arbitrary ASCII sequences, and Epoch provides access to this
feature via the (rebind-key) function. So, to have F1 generate ESC
(which is sort of handy), you can do

(rebind-key "F1" nil "\C-[")

As a side note, rebind-key works on _any_ key. For instance, I use
control minus to close all but the current window (normally ^X1). I do
this with

(rebind-key "minus" 'control "\C-^C-")
(global-set-key "\C-^C-" 'delete-other-windows)	;control -

The problem is that non-ASCII KeySyms must be maped into ASCII
sequences, and the set of sequences is crowded under Emacs. My
solution was to establish my own convention for rebinding, where all
rebound sequences start with control ^ (which is unused), followed by
standardized indicators. Code that does this can be found in
./contrib/amc/keys.el, which is the version that I used at the time of
the 3.2 release (I've since upgraded, since I'm always fiddling with
things).

What's the point? In order to have PgUp do what you expect, you have
to do 2 things. First, rebind-key the KeySym to an ASCII sequence.
Second, global-set-key that sequence to an interactive function that
moves up a page. For a Sun-4 keyboard, this could be done with

(rebind-key "R9" nil "\C-^k9")
(global-set-key "\C-^k9" 'scroll-down)	; Page Up

I recommend the use of the "xev" program for this. It will tell you
what KeySym is being generated by a particular key. Also, note that
these rebindings apply only to Epoch, not to other X clients that
might be running.

Douglas Rand also wrote an improved version of the system I used,
where much of the work is done automatically, which I can repost if
there's a lot of demand for it.

-- 
Alan M. Carroll          <-- Another casualty of applied metaphysics
Epoch Development Team   
Urbana Il.               "I hate shopping with the reality-impaired" - Susan