From: Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de>
Subject: Re: [rfc] compound keymaps with prefixed count modifier like vi(1)
To: gameoftrees@openbsd.org
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2022 17:33:53 +0200

Omar Polo:

> abort keys are IMHO one of the weakest point of tog :)

Indeed.

> If I can suggest something here, I'd go with with C-g.  I'm biased
> because Emacs uses it to interrupt various kinds of things, but less(1)
> uses it too.  ESC maybe would be familiar for vi users?

I'm also partial to ^G.  (Mutt is another application that uses it.)

ESC is a poor choice.  Since the character introduces all sorts of
special sequences, like those for cursor keys, a single ESC is
difficult to separate from ESC as part of a sequence.  I think
curses mostly does this by way of a timeout, i.e., if no other
character follows for 500 ms, a single ESC is recognized as such.
IIRC, you can also type ESC-ESC to speed this up.  It's cumbersome
and error-prone, and then you have to lecture users how character-based
terminals work, and...

Basically, try to avoid using ESC for anything in a curses-based
user interface.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de