They pretty much are. Terminals implement CTRL keyboard shortcuts as `c ^ 0100` and ALT works by prefixing '\e'. Stuff like arrow keys encode using VT100 codes.

They pretty much are. Terminals implement CTRL keyboard shortcuts as `c ^ 0100` and ALT works by prefixing '\e'. Stuff like arrow keys encode using VT100 codes. Those are three very simple rule that everyone knows. $ wget https://justine.lol/ttyinfo.com $ chmod +x ttyinfo.com $ ./ttyinfo.com "\001" is CTRL-A a.k.a. ^A "\000" is CTRL-@ a.k.a. ^@ "\002" is CTRL-B a.k.a. ^B "\f" is CTRL-L a.k.a. ^L "\r" is CTRL-M a.k.a. ^M "\033\001" is ALT-CTRL-A "\033[A" is UP "\033\033[A" is ALT-UP Unfortunately it still leaves much to be desired. For example, have you ever wanted to have CTRL-ENTER as a keyboard shortcut in your terminal? Sadly you can't, because chr(ord('\r') ^ 0100) encodes as 'M'. Another issue is it's not possible to encode CTRL+[ as a keyboard shortcut, because it overlaps with \e a.k.a. 033 a.k.a. ASCII ESC. So if you type that shortcut, it'll cause your terminal to hang for a second. It'd be great if the standard bodies could promulgate some kind of well-defined solution to this problem. Having read the ECMA standards documents, I think they really could be doing more to focus on the people who use it for terminals!