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

[mdlbear]

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.

Comments

[janeg.livejournal.com]

I share her love for Nethack. Why pay for games when that one is so addictive?

What I can no longer find is how to save a back-up copy of a game to return to after I die. I used to be able to do this. I run the latest tiles version on Mac OS10.5.

[mdlbear]

It may require enabling something in the options (.nethackrc on Linux; don't know where it would be on Mac but possibly the same).

If it makes you feel bettter

[capplor.livejournal.com]

Isaac Asimov once wrote an essay about making very similar "dumb" mistakes. (Something about deriving a law of orbital mechanics after forgetting it already existed and was famously named.)

[mneme]

*grin*

I eventually gave up and just learned the vi keys (which proved fairly useful when years later, I gave up and learned vi).

Of course, I was playing the game for over 15 YEARS before I managed to ascend.