terminator ctrl-tab key binding

Question

pressing ctrl-tab in terminator has the same effect as pressing tab, but when I see the key-bindings in the setting, nothing is mapped to ctrl-tab, so why is ctrl-tab reserved?

Now, if I am working with xterm, I know a way around this. So essentially I am trying to see if there is a similar workaround. The solution goes like,

Add the following lines to .Xresources:

*vt100.translations: #override \n\
    Ctrl ~Shift <Key>Tab: string(0x1b) string("[27;5;9~") \n \
    Ctrl Shift <Key>Tab: string(0x1b) string("[27;6;9~") \n

reload

xrdb ~/.Xresources

and add the following lines. Here I am trying to cycle through screen windows with ctrl-tab and ctrl-shift-tab

# Ctrl-Tab
bindkey "^[[27;5;9~" next

# Ctrl-Shift-Tab
bindkey "^[[27;6;9~" prev

Answer 1

Terminals send characters to applications, not keys. Keys are encoded as characters or character sequences; most function keys send a sequence beginning with the escape character (character 27 = 033 = 0x1b = ^[ = \e).

There is no standard escape sequence corresponding to the key combination Ctrl+Tab, so most terminals send the character 9 = ^I = TAB = \t, just like for a plain Tab.

As you've discovered, you can configure xterm to send different escape sequences through X resources. Terminator is descended from Gnome-terminal, which has very few customization capabilities (like the rest of Gnome). As far as I know, it offers no such configuration capability.