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From: jthomas@nmsu.CSNET
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: gnumacs bindings
Message-ID: <8709181153.AA08300@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Thu, 17-Sep-87 16:22:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8709181153.AA08300
Posted: Thu Sep 17 16:22:44 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 20-Sep-87 00:51:19 EDT
References: <3590005@hpindda.HP.COM>
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   At 15 Sep 87 16:50:26 GMT, Jack Repenning said:
   ...
   If this tremendous cultural river against which Emacs swims is a local
   phenomenon, then I'm fairly happy with monkeying with the keyboard
   translate table.  It just seemed a little odd that anyone would want
   to swim against that current in the first place.
   ...
It seems to me that this "cultural river" is relative.  Emacs started on a
system which used DELete to mean just that (and most of the terminals had a
nice DELete key!).  Some(how,when) Unix(tm) picked (first "#" and then)
BACKspace to mean delete.  (I assume some Unix guru's keyboard didn't have
a decent DELete key?)  Now Emacs runs on Unix systems, and Unix users are
used to BACKspace.  (But in:
   ...    The problem
   faced by anyone using an HP keyboard (aren't many other keyboards like
   this, too?) is that the BACKSPACE key is big, friendly, easy to hit,
   and used by every other program commonly run to mean (what in emacs we
               ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
   call) backward-delete-character.
he said that programs use BACKspace to mean delete - isn't he really saying
that most users have stty'ed BACKspace for del ??????)

Unfortunately the keyboard world seems to have divided between ones with
decent DELete keys and ones with decent BACKspace keys.  We can discuss the
philosophical ideas of C-h, but for many the non-existence of a DELete key
forces the use of BACKspace to mean delete.  (And I'm about to buy one of
those turkeys!?!?)

Jim Thomas		jthomas@nmsu.csnet	formerly JNTCS@UNO.BITNET