> ESC was supposed to work immediately, not after a delay.

It's not mc's fault, the Escape delay is added by the terminal emulator, to correctly handle escape sequences. You can probably configure it, but the most portable way that works everywhere is to simply press it twice quickly. It's only barely slower than the DOS way of doing it, and much faster than pressing and waiting for a second.

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ptspts 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

This should have been solved in the last 30 years on Linux console, X terminal emulators and through SSH.

	▲	tracker1 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's more of a "just in case" thing for the most part... the actual risk of an escape as part of a sequence showing up over TCP without the rest for over a fraction of a second today is highly unlikely. That said, so many systems seem to add a delay well over half a second like we're using dialup. I'd probably tune the delay to 100-200ms if I ever really felt it and have the option to change it.
	▲	mmastrac 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The kitty key protocol solves this, but your app and terminal need to support it. Many do.

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5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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zahlman 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In gnome-terminal, I have yet to succeed in inputting an escape sequence manually without the escape key being interpreted separately.

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couscouspie 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't even understand the problem: ESC and the following key is generally just an alias for ALT+key.