You can't spell "evil" without "vi".

[Loïc Grenié]

2008/10/14 Alessandro Rubini <rubini-list at gnudd.com>:
>
>> Ok, making poll wait 300 miliseconds before deciding there's no next character
>> in a pending escape sequence seems to have fixed it.  (At least I can't
>> reproduce the problem under qemu anymore.)  The downside is that when you hit
>> escape with nothing after it, the gui won't update for 1/3 of a second, but
>> that's way better than corrupting data.
>
> Actually, I remember on good old unix with good old green-phosphors
> vt100-lookalike terminals the delay after pressing ESC was there.
>
> We were all happy back then, as we knew the reason why.

    Same behaviour for the same reason over 1200bps modems. "Wait
  some time before interpreting ESC" was a standard programming
  technique...

        Loïc