#308 New defaults for Shift/Ctrl + arrows
Joe uses Ctrl+arrows for highlighting, and doesn't recognize the escape sequences generated by Shift+arrows.
This behavior is quite unconventional. Recent systems (mostly graphical ones, but also some in the terminal like emacs or mcedit) use Shift for highlighting, and Ctrl for jumping in larger units.
I recommend to change joe's default to this de facto standard.
A bit more technical info:
In recent years xterm has settled on a particular way of encoding modifiers in the escape sequences. E.g. Up = ^[[A, Shift+Up = ^[[1;2A, Ctrl+Up = ^[[1;5A, Shift+Ctrl+Up = ^[[1;6A etc. The exact same system is used for the 4 arrows and Home/End, and PgUp/PgDn are also very similar (the additional "1" doesn't appear, the first number is instead fixed 5 for PgUp and 6 for PgDn).
The number encoding the modifiers is 1 + (1 for Shift) + (2 for Alt/Meta) + (4 for Ctrl).
Most of the terminal emulators, including konsole and gnome-terminal have also implemented these.
Hotkeys Shift+Alt and Ctrl+Alt are often handled by window managers, but lone Shift, Ctrl or Alt, as well as Shift+Ctrl are safe bets most of the time. The most notable exception is probably Shift+PgUg/PgDn (and maybe even Shift+Home/End) which are often used for scrolling in terminal history (although gnome-terminal emits them on the alternate screen, that is, joe's "tite" mode). Another example worth mentioning is Ctrl+PgUp/PgDn in gnome-terminal, Ctrl+Shift+Left/Right in konsole to switch tab, but these are configurable.
I believe joe should do the following if it encounters any of such sequences:
Ctrl+Left/Right: Move the cursor by a word (currently ^Z and ^X).
Ctrl+Up/Down: Not sure; maybe jumping to the next paragraph (as emacs does) would be useful; I don't know if joe supports this action. Or it could scroll the file and leave the cursor at the same position on the screen, as Alt+X and Alt+Z does, but maybe this could be mapped to Alt+Up and Alt+Down instead.
Ctrl+Home/End: Probably jump to the beginning/end of the file, as emacs does.
Ctrl+PgUp/PgDn: I don't know, if you have any cool idea feel free to go ahead. Maybe jump by 1% of file size??
Shift+any_cursor_movement (even if it includes Ctrl or Alt too): do exactly as it would do without the shift, but also start/extend the selection. E.g. Shift+Home would highlight to the beginning of the line, Shift+Ctrl+Right would jump right by a word and highlight, etc.
I've wanted to do this, but PuTTY (Windows) doesn't quite support it, which limits my motivation. There, Ctrl+Arrows look exactly like Shift+Arrows and forget about Ctrl+Shift.
Ctrl+Up/Down - I've seen this scroll the viewport in other applications and rather like that behavior, as I can never seem to remember ^[W/Z (and why contort my fingers for those when the mouse wheel works?)
Ctrl+PgUp/Down - Could then go between paragraphs, and I've seen this on e.g. notepad2. Visual Studio jumps to the first or last line on screen (just giving you more datapoints here)
I don't think there are many commands to add here, though I've noticed that sometimes the mouse interacts poorly with commands that change the selection state (and can never remember what I did to get that to happen) so that might be a potential gotcha.
I guess we could start by sending a feature request or even a patch to PuTTY folks. It's not really being developed these days, and releases are only made when there's a security issue discovered [edit: it is being developed in the vcs, it's just that releases are rare], but if the feature makes it to their svn [edit: they've switched to git!] then we're already on a good track.
"sometimes the mouse interacts poorly with commands that change the selection state" -- what do you mean by this?
Last edit: Egmont Koblinger 2015-02-17
Some of these sequences (e.g. Ctrl+Pagexx) could also be bound to prev/next window (^KN/^KP).
PuTTY just released 0.64... and those key sequences are still the same :-. On the bright side, they fixed the weirdness I was seeing with bracketed paste!
Let me bump this please.
Almost exactly 9 years after reporting this bug, I suspect PuTTY still hasn't changed. The last time I checked (quite a while ago), it was in minimal maintenance mode involving ssh security updates only, nothing about terminal emulation.
In the mean time, Windows Terminal has emerged, and with an ssh command also available on Windows, it's an absolutely great, modern replacement for PuTTY, offering many more modern features as well.
I'm not asking to remove any feature or the possibility to configure it. I'm asking to change the default. Any PuTTY user will be able to modify their configs to revert to the old behavior, and so will be everyone who got used to Joe's unconventional behavior so much that they would prefer not to change.
I believe Joe should not care about that single terminal emulator that failed to catch up throughout the years. It should care about all the rest that did, and about the practice of pretty much every single application out there using Shift+Arrows for highlighting text.