Linux terminal with full keyboard support?

Question

I made a text editor and I want to port it to Linux such that I can use it remotely via SSH. I don't know much about Linux terminals, so maybe I'm missing something obvious, because I just can't believe that in 2013 there's still no way for a remote terminal to distinguish between Ctrl+M and Enter, or between Ctrl+H and Backspace, or even get any events at all for Ctrl+Left/Right/Up/Down, and so on. I tried ncurses and libtermkey to no avail. The question is, is there any effort or discussion in the Linux community on modernizing or replacing the linux terminal protocol(s) to something that supports full keyboard and mouse interaction and possibly full color, i.e. something that would allow for text user-interfaces without huge usability compromises?

Answer 1

As far as I know, the Linux console terminal just doesn't support this, full stop. If you want to try raising a patch, you could have a go at implementing the full CSI-encoded reporting scheme. It is documented here.

libtermkey will recognise the key sequences if sent, but the fix has to go into the terminal first of all to send them in the first place.