Midnight Commander in 14.2: problems with keys
 

I've upgraded a friends laptop from 14.1 to 14.2. Laptop is Acer Aspire with 8GB and 1.6GHz Ci5-8250U. All packages on all disksets were installed but did not install any from e,f,k,kde, t, and xfce.

Using fluxbox as desktop. Keyboard is US

Everything work just fine except for Midnight Commander.
There is a problem with the '*', '-' (dash) and the '+' (shift =) keys, they are allocated to the file selection dialogs.

Say you are typing something on the command line
of MC (mv -i file1 file2) as soon as you press the dash the 'unselect file' dialog pops up, similarly while typing if you press the '*' key all files are selected, and if you press the '+' you get the 'select files' dialog popup. The '-', '+' are not echoed on the MC command line.

I've never seen this before in any Slackware release even -current on another machine. I cannot find any thread related to this.

Note that the keypad +, -, and * work as expected.

I tried to fix by coping /etc/mc.default.keymap to ~/.config/mc such that:
Select = alt-plus becomes Select = kpplus
Unselect = alt-minus becomes Unselect = kpminus
SelectInvert = alt-asterisk becomes SelectInvert = kpasterisk

This doesn't fix problem.

Problem occurs in a vt (i.e. TERM=linux) as well as in X (TERM=xterm).

These are defined in xterm.
XTERM_LOCALE=en_US
XTERM_SHELL=/bin/bash

Can someone help fix for this please.

Unfortunately, I can't offer much help other than to say that this is definitely not a universal problem with 14.2, as it works fine here. Just as a shot in the dark, is the behavior changed at all if you switch to a different terminal emulator (in X)?

The problem occurs in a regular VT, as well as xterm and rxvt

I agree it is not a universal problem with 14.2, I've never seen this before, and on my -current installation the problem does not occur. I'm looking for a way to redefine those keys in MC but don;t know how

There is an option which gives this behavior:

edit file ~/.config/mc/ini (not with mc)

locate option The value should be '1' for the usual behavior. if the value is '0', what you describe happens.

So you should just make sure you have .

[SOLVED] Midnight Commander in 14.2: problems with keys
 

Hi philanc, you're correct! Thanks for solving it for me.