How do I set key bindings for ctrl page up and ctrl page down in gnu screen?

Question

So ctrl page up and down are all the rage nowadays, and I'd like to be able to C-p and C-n in gnu screen when I hit ctrl-pgup and down. I've tried and tried but the documentation is a little thin. Any ideas?

Answer 1

It turns out you can do it. I finally figured it out.

With the help of this...

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/76566/where-do-i-find-a-list-of-terminal-key-codes-to-remap-shortcuts-in-bash

I add this to ~/.screenrc:

bindkey -t ^[[5;7~ prev
bindkey -t ^[[6;7~ next

and that gets me Ctrl + Alt + PageUp/Down moves between screen tabs.

Answer 2

A controlpageup depends upon the particular terminal, but most of the ones you are interested in copy one of the flavors from xterm. Those look like

^[[5;5~

or in terminfo format

\E[5;5~

That is 6 characters.

However, screen (see 14.1 The bind command from screen's manual) says that it only knows how to bind a single character.

So the answer is: you cannot do that with screen.

Answer 3

You can define it easily using the bindkey command:

bindkey -t <key-code> <command>

It allows you to map any key to any command. For switching to the previous and next window, use commands prev and next.

The key code for PageDown is ^[[5~ and PageUp ^[[6~, so to switch windows using those two keys, add the following to your ~/.screenrc configuration:

bindkey -t ^[[5~ prev
bindkey -t ^[[6~ next

To add the Ctrl modifier, add ;5 to the key code:

bindkey -t ^[[5;5~ prev
bindkey -t ^[[6;5~ next

For the Alt modifier, add ;3 and for Ctrl + Alt, add ;7.

The -t parameter disables the timer so there may be a time gap between the presses of the individual keys.

Finding Out Key Codes

It's possible that on different systems or terminals, key codes may be different. To find out the exact codes, execute showkey -a and press the keys or key combinations of your interest, the program will print their codes in the first column.

Answer 4

The title text in the question asks about ctrl+pageup and ctrl+pagedown, but the selected answer mentions alt+ctrl. Here's how xterm reads ctrl+pageup and ctrl+pagedown.

in ~/.screenrc:

# ctrl+pgup = prev
bindkey -t ^[[5;5~ prev
# ctrl+pgdn = next
bindkey -t ^[[6;5~ next