Thank you, Vince.
You gave me food for thought.
... is about as far as I got. It means that the 'x' os overwritten, as expected.
Similar attempts with Alias @key produced results which lead me to believe that the ANSI interpretation is left "out of the loop" when key-strike aliases send characters to the command line buffer. That would mean that ANSI cursor movements are not possible.
Even when Esc is made a normalkey.
I'm moving on. It was fun, though.
Thanks again, DJ.