But... it works on *my* machine!

One of Colleen's little pleasures in life is Nethack. She never bothered to learn the cursor-movement keys, though, which are based on vi. She's always used the arrows. They work on the PC version, and they've always worked for her on the Linux version, too. So it was a little surprising that they didn't work on her EeePC.

Odd that there didn't seem to be a config-file option to enable them.

I finally looked at the example config file for nethack-x11. All the way through it. And found a familiar-looking key-translation table. Oh.

As it turns out, I had encountered this problem a dozen years ago, and fixed it by putting exactly that four-line key-translation table into the household's shared Xdefaults file. And forgotten that I'd done it.

Dumb bear. Was a smart bear, once upon the time.