That's not the way to go about this problem, I think. Look at the vncviewer app it solves this very problem by only making the virtual keyboard available upon user demand -- they use the D-pad center key to do this. I can't explian exactly how they do this, but their code patches itself into the management of the hildon-input method... that is, you need to explicitly code an application to do this. You may want to look attheir source code to learn how it is done.

I too run text-based apps on xterm and wish for exactly what you asking. I do all my email with University of Washington's excellent email client Alpine... and having the keyboard popping up all the time and taking over a third of the screen is a pain. But that's how osso-xterm is coded... to do what you and I wish would mean hacking / recoding osso-xterm. This would be another solution.

Another solution would consiste of creating an xterm equivalent without hildon-input method support and rely instead on any of a variety of virtual keyboards used for X-based apps which don't have hildon-input method support.

Indeed, an approximation to this can be experienced as follows. It is actually possible to disable the hildon-input method... but the control is global. I quote,

"This solution doesn't selectively disabling the vkb, but
enabling/disabling the vkb/hwr system wide can be done by setting a
boolean value to this gconf key (note: IT2008 only).

/apps/osso/inputmethod/enable-stylus-im"

do it carefully, least you brick your system... you an do it via the line-mode gconf utility or via the gui-based gconf-editor... if you do this and use any of the virtual keyboards available you'l get what you want more of eless... but then switching back to other applications becomes a pain as you have to re-enable the vkb for them.

As for elinks, do take a look at http://pupnik.de/links2.html, a port of the links browser... they too deal with the problem of keyboard input.

-- Denis