> So even today, on Unix-like systems, applications running in a terminal emulator receive the character Ctrl-I when the user presses the Tab key, the character Ctrl-[ when the user presses Esc, etc.
Of course, there are still more creative ways. Like
:.! kill -9 $(pgrep -u $(whoami) vim)How I understood the original problem is that you're in vim, you started editing text (insert mode) and now want to exit; but there is no Esc, so even exiting insert mode is a challenge. And now you added the constraint of missing Ctrl too, so no Ctrl-[ or Ctrl-C.
If you type `:.! kill -9 $(pgrep -u $(whoami) vim)` then you just entered that as text into your document.
One answer could be to use the trackball, launch a new terminal window and kill the process from there.
But, to note: There's another alternative that should mostly still work here, even in the absence of Ctrl: Alt-Backspace