ne's manual

4.9.9: EscapeTime

after n tenths of second (see Motivations and Design). Along slow connections, it can happen that the default value of 10 is too low: in this case, escape sequences (e.g., those of the arrow keys) could be erroneously broken into an escape and some spurious characters. Rising the escape time usually solves this problem. Allowed values range from 0 to 255.

Note that the escape time is global to ne, and it is not saved. However, you can add manually to a preferences file an EscapeTime command.