control arrow keys in rxvt, tcsh, and emacs

<a href="http://rxvt.org/"><img src="terminal.jpg"></a>
<a href="http://tcsh.org/"><img src="tcsh_oystercatcher.jpg"></a>
<a href="http://gnu.org/software/emacs/"><img src="gnu.jpg"></a>

I
use [rxvt](http://rxvt.org/) as my terminal, [tcsh](http://tcsh.org/) as my
interactive shell, and [emacs](http://gnu.org/software/emacs/) as my editor. I
love them all.

However, for a long time, I mostly used the default key bindings in tcsh and
emacs, which are different for a few things. The most noticeable was moving
forward and backward by whole words, instead of characters. I used Alt-B and
Alt-F in tcsh, since those were the defaults. They work in emacs too, but I used
Control-Left and Control-Right in emacs since I grew up on Windows. (Go ahead
and laugh. :P)

Recently, I got sick of this and figured out how to get control and arrow keys
working in tcsh and emacs -nw, inside rxvt. When rxvt sees Control-Left and
Control-Right, it translates them to Meta-O, d and Meta-O, c before passing them
to the running application.

So, I just added these lines to my `.cshrc`:

    bindkey "^[Od" backward-word  \# control-left
    bindkey "^[Oc" forward-word   \# control-right

They should work for any csh derivate, not just tcsh. I also added these lines
to [my .emacs](dotfiles/.emacs):

    ; rxvt's keycodes for C-<left> and C-<right> are M-O d and M-O c,
    (global-set-key [(meta O) (d)] 'backward-word)
    (global-set-key [(meta O) (c)] 'forward-word)

and I added these to my [my .inputrc](dotfiles/.inputrc) for bash and other apps
that use readline:

    "\eOd": backward-word
    "\eOc": forward-word

Now control and the arrow keys should skip words, like god intended, even inside
your terminal! This is especially useful when I'm ssh'ed into remote, headless
servers, and using my [minimal .emacs for fast startup](minimal_emacs_for_fast_startup).

I made a halfhearted attempt to find xterm's keycodes for Control-Left and
Control-Right, but they eluded me. C-h k (ie describe-key) in emacs doesn't even
catch them at all!

P.S. Thanks to
[MIT's rxvt Reference](http://www.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/outland/doc/rxvt/html/refer.html) and
[this cygwin mailing list thread](http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2003-09/msg00545.html).