8 Where Is the Key Map for 3270 Emulation?

Real 3270 terminals have all sorts of keys that regular ASCII terminals (and PCs and Macintoshes and UNIX workstations, etc) do not have.

A big part of the job of a 3270 protocol converter is to convert between ASCII keystrokes (including escape sequences) and 3270 keys such as PA1 through PA3 and PF1 through PF24.

The administrator of the 3270 protocol converter creates the mapping. So in order to make a 3270 key map for Kermit, you first have to find out what the mapping in the protocol converter is, and then assign the ASCII values (characters or sequences) that correspond to each 3270 key to the desired PC (or Mac, etc) key.

It is the responsibility of each site administrator to document the key mappings used by its protocol converters. Once you know the ASCII values that correspond to each 3270 key, then it's easy to create Kermit key bindings.

For example, suppose the 3270 "cursor left" function (left arrow) is mapped to ASCII Ctrl-B (ASCII character 2). Then in MS-DOS Kermit you would:

  SET KEY \4427 \2