Comment 13 for bug 96676

Izzy, the second paragraph you wrote is rather uninformative. Many of the characters being generated are being stripped out, using the method you've described. Use "cat" instead.

Note that for many terminals, the sequences generated will depend greatly upon whether the terminal is in "keypad transmit" mode, which most applications that expect to use special keys will set. The sequences for special keys that are described in the terminfo database _only_ apply to behavior when "keypad transmit" mode is activated (when available); it does not describe what the sequences should look like when that mode is not in effect. The best way to see what they look like when "keypad transmit" mode is enabled, is to use the command "tput smkx; cat; tput rmkx" to test the typing.

There is nothing particularly special about F1..F4 compared with F5..., they simply generate different sequences (which are both documented correctly in terminfo).

Xterm's behavior for generating control sequences have _not_ changed recently; gnome-terminal's (and xfce4-terminal's) on the other hand, have (and are broken). And, as I've said, there is no mechanism for terminfo to describe control+<special key>, and thus, no way for xterm to break it.

For much, much more info about the problem in gnome-terminal, see bug 89660.