putty function keys in AIX

I’m having fun and games with AIX! I have two telnet clients, putty (fantastic client) and KEA!. I’ve been using KEA! successfully but would like to switch to putty, however the function keys didn’t result in the same escape characters being sent as in KEA!.

After a post to google groups and a very helpful link I finally started to make some progress. I only need keys F1 to F20 working and I’m there.

What I had to do was set putty’s setting under Terminal -> Keyboard -> The function keys and keypad to “Xterm R6”. This doesn’t exactly match what KEA! output but its close. The big difference is that with KEA I use ctrl with F1 to F10 to access the keys F11 to F20; on putty this is shift instead of ctrl.

In case it is any help to anyone, here are the outputs of F1 to F12 on the first line, shift and F1 to F12 on the second line, and ctrl and F1 to F12 on the third line, for both putty and KEA!.

putty:



<sup>[OP</sup>[OQ^[OR^[OS^[[15~^[[17~^[[18~^[[19~^[[20~^[[21~^[[23~^[[24~
<sup>[[23~</sup>[[24~^[[25~^[[26~^[[28~^[[29~^[[31~^[[32~^[[33~^[[34~^[[23~^[[24~
<sup>[OP</sup>[OQ^[OR^[OS^[[15~^[[17~^[[18~^[[19~^[[20~^[[21~^[[23~^[[24~

and KEA!:



<sup>[OP</sup>[OQ^[OR^[OS^[[17~^[[18~^[[19~^[[20~^[[21~^[[23~^[[24~
l
<sup>[[23~</sup>[[24~^[[25~^[[26~^[[28~^[[29~^[[31~^[[32~^[[33~^[[34~^[[23~^[[24~

NB F5 is missing from the KEA! one since pressing it while running cat caused cat to coredump!!

Anyway that was today’s crash course in escape chars, my putty is now working well and I can use it for the apps which use the function keys too, which is good news.

One thought on “putty function keys in AIX

  1. Here’s a quality telnet program for the Win32 Console:

    http://consoletelnet.sourceforge.net/

    I think I had to remap the keys for it so it didn’t think I was American though. Presumably you can do your function keys as well.

    Am pretty much using ssh in cygwin rather than telnet these days though – either way can’t live without Alt-Enter for full screen!

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