How I bind control keys for work in shell (in terminals)

Have the terminal (emulator) produce distinct key sequences

• control+minus rxvt does a nice trick (cf. xterm), documented in rxvt.
• backspace ... is ok equal to Control-h, rather than Control-?. So I set the "terminal mode" of rxvt: echo -e '\e[?67h', which inverts Control-Backspace and Backspace sequences: ^h and ^?
• delete

Have nice bindings: commands of the shell line editor

deleting (backwards), navigation (skip)

• char
• word /usr/src/linux-1 is 4 words
• arguments /usr/src/linux is 1 such unit
• directory segment /usr/src/linux-1 is 3 segments

getting more keys available!

you can see the list of such bindings by:

stty -a

• Control-s is one of them unsetopt FLOW_CONTROL to have C-s do the search while editing the command line.
• Control-r is another of them! C-r is a history-incremental-search-backward

For Xterm i can configure at launch time:

XTerm.*ttyModes: rprnt ^-

for rxvt: you have to recompile :(

#ifndef CRPRNT
# define CRPRNT		'\024'	/* ^R  mmc: i prefer ^R in shell! let's try with ^T */
#else
#warning "mmc forces CRPRNT!"
#undef CRPRNT
# define CRPRNT		'\024'	/* ^R  mmc: i prefer ^R in shell! let's try with ^T */
#endif

Explanation!

Since rxvt-unicode coders couldn't understand this issue (see another heated discussion), i try to explain more:

Terminal emulator, let's call it xterm, and shell are connected with a PTY. Both programs can configure it, via ioctl.

PTY is implemented in kernel, scans the byte stream and implements some rewriting (transcriptions).

To avoid such rewriting, any end of the connection (both xterm & shell) must configure it (sort of STTY).

Xterm constructs the PTY. If it does not configure it immediately (before sending first keystrokes), you might already lose. So, it's sometimes necessary to check, that it doese what you need.

I want Control-R to work reliably, so i want the xterm to configure.

For SSH

ttyctl -u
stty rprnt '^T'
ttyctl -f