Make Arrow and delete keys work in KornShell command line

Don't fight it. Just have your administrator change your default shell to bash. bash is included with Solaris 10, is highly ksh compatible, and it supports the key mappings that you like. You can launch bash just by typing:

$ bash

You could exec bash out of your .profile if your administrator is not helpful. Here is what your administrator would do to change user1 to bash (as root):

# passwd -e user1
Old shell: /bin/ksh
New shell: /usr/bin/bash        <- You type this, use whence bash to look up the path
passwd: password information changed for user1

For the arrow keys, you can put this into your the .kshrc file in your home directory:

set -o emacs
alias __A=`echo "\020"`     # up arrow = ^p = back a command
alias __B=`echo "\016"`     # down arrow = ^n = down a command
alias __C=`echo "\006"`     # right arrow = ^f = forward a character
alias __D=`echo "\002"`     # left arrow = ^b = back a character
alias __H=`echo "\001"`     # home = ^a = start of line
alias __Y=`echo "\005"`     # end = ^e = end of line

Note that there are two underscore characters before the letters on the left side of the equal sign. On the right-hand side of the equal, the goal is to get the proper control character assigned to the alias. The way this script does that, is by running the command (via back-tics)

echo "\020"

to get the control-n character assigned to __B.

I used following and is working fine:

set -o emacs

Note: these are the actual control characters. In vi, type i ctrl-v then ctrl-P (if u want a ctrl-p)

alias _A=^P
alias _B=^N
alias _D=^B
alias _C=^F

and add below lines too:

alias __A=^P
alias __B=^N
alias __D=^B
alias __C=^F