Why does the ESC key behave funny?
Midnight Commander uses the ESC key as a prefix for simulating the Meta and Alt keys (for terminals which don’t have Meta or Alt, see the three previous questions). For example, pressing ESC-a is the same as pressing Meta-a. In addition most terminals use ESC for internal representation of arrow keys, function keys and other enhanced keys. If you want to use ESC to cancel things you have to press it twice i.e. ESC-ESC. If you find this cumbersome you can generally use F10 to cancel. Alternatively turn on the old_esc_mode setting in the ~/.mc/ini file. The old_esc_mode setting makes ESC work as a prefix only if another key is pressed within 0.5 seconds. After 0.5 seconds the ESC key cancels. There is no way to make ESC cancel immediately (if we want to be able to use arrows keys and function keys).
