More portable control key awarness (windows and linux)

[KalenAnson]

• I am on the latest Hyper.app version
• I have searched the issues of this repo and believe that this is not a duplicate

• Windows 10:
• 1.2.1:
• Vanilla:
• *N/A:
• Is Vanilla:

Issue

First - I love Hyper and am using it mainly on Windows where I need to crowbar Windows to run bash. The terminal emulator UI is awesome.

The Question

Why does the hyper app use control keys to do anything at all? I am not aware of another terminal emulator that does anything but pass control key codes straight to the shell unless they are paired with another key such as shift or alt.

I know that the control key is used heavily on Windows applications as the shortcut dejour, but hyper is a terminal emulator and these kinds of applications inherently need a different type of control key usage.

Consider:

When running a bash shell in hyper on a Windows machine:

1. Running tmux with standard alt binding of ctrl - a as the tmux leader does not work. Hyper eats ctrl - a and instead helpfully selects all the text in the current pane.
2. Using simple bash shortcuts such as ctrl-p to get last command (up arrow replacement) and then ctrl - n to get the next command in history (down arrow replacement) is awkward. Hyper eats crtl - n and creates a new window.
3. Bash job control. </3 My heart breaks even now, hyper eats ctrl - z.
4. Don't even try to run vim as any combo of ctrl and one of the following n,t,e,o,w,z,x,v,k,r,m will disappear into hyper and do magical things.

Suggestion:

Can we configure hyper to ignore control keys all together? There are so many problems with running a sh shell (bash, zsh, etc) and having the terminal emulator eat your control keys. (I am aware that this is mainly a problem with the Windows flavor of hyper).

Personally I would be fine with just having the option to disable the hyper control keys, but a case could be made for remapping them to something else so as not to lose features.

I think this issue touches on a lot of others around here as well (copy/paste for example which has just recently been improved).

Edited

I updated the issue name and added the section below to help clarify what seems to be the issue.

Related Issues

#1200 (Control characters not working!)
#1120 (1.0.0 release broke some keybindings) Uncertain
#1047 (Text Navigation with control keys)
#833 (Most common readline keybinding don't work (ctrl-a, ctrl-e, ctrl-w etc.) )
#422 (unable to page scroll using alt using tmux) Possibly related
#233 (Tmux bind `)

[hf]

I completely agree and has made working with Hyper impossible for me at this time.

[niedzielski]

This is also a problem on Linux. For example, if I want to type ctrl-r to perform a reverse history look up or if I have my .inputrc configured to for ctrl-left / right (see also #1047), among other bindings, these are all intercepted.

[LukeFlynn]

I also am using Bash on Ubuntu for Windows. Over the years, working in a *nix environment, I've become very familiar with control-a to jump to the beginning of a line, etc. This works fine in the actual wrapper around bash.exe, but not in hyper.

[efraintorlo]

I been used CTRL-a as prefix for tmux, however in a Hyper terminal CTRL-a selects all text. This simple issue is stopping me from use Hyper as my every-day terminal app.

[dawnerd]

Keep running into this after switching between my mac and linux desktop.

[webframp]

Hyper works great on macOS for me, but this is also keeping me from switching to it as my default on Windows 10

[samrocksc]

I use Ctrl-a for tmux as well. It's a pretty popular configuration for screen/tmux/monad users.

[adambair]

Bash on Windows; recently switched from OSX to Windows. I use tmux, vim, and multitude of other console apps. Tried out hyper, worked great on OSX but on Windows it's impossible to do actual work because it swallows the CTRL key.

🤦

edit -- Looks like there might be a solution in the works:

see #1191 and #1509

For the enterprising among us, you can check out / download the PRs and try them... (I'll try this later on)

[Kerwood]

Sooooo... No solution to this ?

[ppot]

@Kerwood You can try latest master I included keymaps

[ppot]

close in #1876