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From: mikef@sarah.lerc.nasa.gov (Mike J. Fuller)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs
Subject: Re: how to use emacs with 'backspace' as 'delete'
Message-ID: <1990Feb3.183918.17186@eagle.lerc.nasa.gov>
Date: 3 Feb 90 18:39:18 GMT
References: <7813@chaph.usc.edu>
Organization: NASA Lewis Research Center, Cleveland, OH
Lines: 32

In article <7813@chaph.usc.edu> kondaman@aludra.usc.edu (Arjun Krishna Kondamani) writes:
>To all you professional emacs programmers, a question from an amateur:
>
>I login to my unix account with an ADDS 2020 terminal. The location of
>the 'backspace' and 'delete' keys is such that I prefer to use the
>'backspace' key to delete text rather than the 'delete' key itself. 

I'm posting this because I have seen more than a few requests for this
recently.  Just put this in your .emacs file:

(progn
  (setq keyboard-translate-table (make-string 128 0))
  (let ((i 0))
    (while (< i 128)
      (aset keyboard-translate-table i i)
      (setq i (1+ i)))))
(aset keyboard-translate-table ?\^? ?\^h)
(aset keyboard-translate-table ?\^h ?\^?)

This will swap backspace and delete (^H and ^?) EVERYWHERE in Emacs.
You can use a similar method to assign ^S and ^Q to other keys if you
enable software flow control (via set-input-mode) and to assign Escape
(^[) to another key if you lack an Escape key (vt200 type keyboard and
some Macs).  This changes the keys at a lower level than the key
bindings and thus eliminates problems with local key bindings in some
buffers like dired.

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| Mike J. Fuller |Internet: mikef@sarah.lerc.nasa.gov     |You'd be paranoid, |
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