doy also advised me not to worry about meta keys - they’re terrible, why would you want to support them?

I have to agree with him. The problem is, meta can be the same as alt, and three different things can happen with alt/meta+i depending on how the client's terminal emulator and keymap is configured.

metaSendsEscape: \x1b u is received.
eightBitMeta: \xf5 is received.
Internationalization: ¨ (underlined) is printed locally, the user then may press 'o' to insert ö, such as firefox is doing for me right now, iTerm also does this, and I think this is most correct -- it allows the swedish folk to write in their natural language.

And what if the user just pressed escape? then nothing happens, so they press the letter 'i'? Is this to be interpreted as ALT + i ?

Instructing the user to re-configure their terminal emulator to be compatible with your program is not recommend. I recommend instead to use the with term.raw() context manager and use only control keys instead.

Pity the emacs user for going through the trouble: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MetaKeyProblems

Curtsies tries to read as much as possible and utilizes this information about what came in on the same read - for example, to tell the difference between plain escape key and escape-prepended other key.

It's perfectly acceptable to get only the \x1b[ of the sequence \x1b[A if using read(1024) when a user presses an arrow key. Telnet, ssh, sockets, protocols, buffers, etc. You can try my bbs at telnet://1984.ws and see blessed being (ab)used, where receiving only portions of a multibyte sequence (MBS) is common. I was getting reports of some keys sometimes not working. It wasn't going to work without timing.

I don’t like having to do a timed delay to detect the escape key, but it sounds like it’s necessary.

I try manually typing "[A" or "OA" in many interfaces at different rates -- on my desktop now: bash and irssi waits forever, doesn't care how slow I type it -- whereas vim emits a bell after 1 second. Anyway that's what the esc_delay parameter for inkey is for.

Many developers struggle with it. Best recommendation is not to present the user with the option of pressing escape. This avoids any noticeable delay.

add escape key-prepended sequences to Blessed

I'm a bit on the fence about supporting these in blessed at all. I'll chew on the idea some more. I have a todo item in the code about it:

        # TODO(jquast): "meta sends escape", where alt+1 would send '\x1b1',
        #               what do we do with that? Surely, something useful.
        #               comparator to term.KEY_meta('x') ?
        # TODO(jquast): Ctrl characters, KEY_CTRL_[A-Z], and the rest;
        #               KEY_CTRL_\, KEY_CTRL_{, etc. are not legitimate
        #               attributes. comparator to term.KEY_ctrl('z') ?

add support in Blessings for currently supported features in Curtsies like distinguishing ctrl-left and ctrl-right from normal forms

Ah yes, I never noticed. These could definitely be added. These keys have meaning for desktop controls on my machine, so it never reaches my emulator unless I disable them.

Uh oh!

Using Blessed instead of blessings #57

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