Thanks, but I have tried no less that 7 different shells: Putty, SSH 3.2.9, Secure Koala Term, Tera Term, AniTa and a couple of others that I failed to keep track off.

All have some advantages and disadvantages.

• Putty

  I can't find a way to resume the current session when my isp drops the ball.

• SSH 3.2.9

  This better in some senses in that it remembers what host and userid you were using and only requires you to hit the spacebar and retype the password, but it has other constraints. It only seems to do one sort of terminal emulation, and that emulation doesn't have any way of distinguishing between cursor-left and control-cursor-left etc.

• AniTa

  Very powerful. Emulates almost anything you could want, has fully configurable keyboard mappings, scripting language and a lot more besides. Unfortunately, it also comes with a load of 3d-whizzy baggage that gets in the way, and spreads it's configuration across about a dozen files and dialogs in a way that is almost incomprehensible. I simply gave up trying to work out how to set it up.

• Secure Koala Term is pretty neat. Unfortunately it tries so hard to emulate a limited set of Dec terminals that were old hat when I started programmng and haven't been manufactured since before many of the people reading this were born, that it is severly limiting. If your an afficinado of Dec's EDT editor it would be great, but the last time I used that was 1984.
• Tera Term

  I forgot why I threw this one out. Needless to say, I wasn't too impressed.

The main problem I was having was more to do with finding out what functions where available (bind -p), and what they did, which isn't entirely obvious from their names.

Then what character sequences were generated by what keys, and that depends on which terminal your emulator emulates.

Finally, somewhere in one of my attempts to configure the keyboard to what I consider to be a rational set of mappings, I obviously deleted something vital because I arrived at a point where simply nothing worked.

My hope was that someone with a good understand of the interactions between emulator types/ vi -v- emacs modes, bind, .inputrc, readline and all the other bits and pieces that go together to cause pressing a key on my keyboard to do something on the host had already done the work.

The BOFH that manages the system in question has managed to restore the status quo and enhance it somewhat closer to my idea of a sensible configuration. The mappings only seem to work with Putty -- not SSH or any of the others for reasons that completely elude me, but it's better than where I was a few days ago:)