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From: ALLEN T. SANTORA (ELEN) <asantora@phosphorus>
Subject: working with the escape character
Date: 1996/02/12
Message-ID: <4fo7ns$3ug@portal.gmu.edu>#1/1
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organization: George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, USA
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Greetings all...

I have had a couple of requests for info on how to use ascii value 027 (escape) into vi, pico, etc. What follows is an EXTREMELY ugly hack to at least enable for use the escape character in vi and pico.

the below assumes you're on a UNIX platform (I can come up with VMS instructions as well)

1. use this command to dump an escape character into a file named ec (you can name it anything you like):

echo (esc) > ec

note that (esc) means the escape key, not the ^ character followed by the the bracket [.

you can then use this small file as a convienient way to pull an escape character into an editor.

this gives you a file named ec with 3 characters in it: the escape character, and ascii newline, and an eof character. You can then edit out the newline (if you really want) and just leave the escape character and the eof (can't get rid of the eof). In fact, you can dump as many escape characters in a file as you wish (I personally have a file named ec with two escape characters separated by a space for greater convienience).

that's it,

2a (vi)
in vi, while working on your art, go to command mode, enter a : (appears at the bottom of the screen), then type a lower case r (to retrieve a file) followed by a space and then the actual name of the file (in this case, the file with your ascii escapes), e.g.

~
~
~
~
:r ec

that will put the escape on the line below the current position of the cursor before you went into command mode. 

2b(pico)
in pico, use ^R (ctrl+r) to retrieve the escape.

I don't know how to retieve in emacs...

please refer to the VT100 escape sequence list I posted here a little while ago. I also have the wyse 50 set (not nearly as interesting as the VT100)

Allen