How to send F9-F12 to curses program running inside Terminal.app?

Question

F9-F12 are used by Mac OS X, and I don't want to get rid of them, I just want to be able to send F9-F12 occasionally to programs inside terminal (mostly F9/F10).

Some programs like mc support sequence Escape 9 as synonym for F9 etc. but it's not universal.

It there any way to do it?

Answer 1

You can run an AppleScript (e.g. by wrapping it in a Service in Automator with the Run AppleScript action, with no input in Terminal) that executes the following:

tell application "System Events" 
    tell expose preferences to set the properties of the all windows shortcut to {function key:F1}
    key code 101 # press F9
    tell expose preferences to set the properties of the all windows shortcut to {function key:F9}
end tell

This will temporarily assign a different shortcut to what's bound to F9, press F9, and revert the setting. The setting names are the following for the other Expose preferences:

all windows shortcut
application windows shortcut
show desktop shortcut
dashboard shortcut 

The key codes for F9 to F12 are the following:

F9 101
F10 109
F11 103
F12 111

You can assign keyboard shortcuts to services in System Preferences » Keyboard » Keyboard Shortcuts » Services You will need to learn another shortcut (e.g. Command-F9), but at least you can press a key to initiate the action. For shortcuts using F-keys, see the last paragraph in this answer.

---

You can alternatively configure a hotkey/macro application like Butler to press the escape sequence you get from cat -v when pressing one of the F-keys while you deactivated the shortcuts.

$ cat -v
^[[20~^[[21~^[[23~^[[24~

These are F9 to F12, in order.

In Butler, it looks like this for F9:

I pressed Ctrl-[, [, 2, 0, ~ for that sequence. On my keyboard layout, ~ is Shift-backtick, that's why the Shift modifier is visible. Works anyway.

Configure a shortcut and you can start pressing that to get the escape sequence:

Works in mc, and I don't recall another CLI program with F-keys at the moment. But it's not the mc specific escape sequence, so it will probably work in others.

---

Alternatively, many command line applications understand Esc, 1 (sequence) to mean F1, through to Esc, 0 meaning F10.

Answer 2

I'll add that if you are on a laptop, you're not actually using F9-F12, you're pressing "next song", "audio mute", "volume down" (example from recent macbookpro). To actually press F9-F12, keep 'Fn' pressed while using the same key.

On the desktop, if you have stuff like Exposé, Spaces, and so on mapped to the actual F9-F12 keyboard keys, I find it useful to associate those functions with additional mouse buttons (eg. I use the 'lateral button pair' of the Mighty Mouse to activate Exposé) or screen edges (eg. I have 'screen standby' in top-left) - but this is actually a subjective matter.