From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <0a1701c0e0a0$f7c5abd0$e8b7c6d4@SOMA>
From: "Boyd Roberts" <boyd@planete.net>
To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
References: <9866732295.20010518111829@proweb.co.uk> <001701c0dfd0$82f59ca0$2248dec2@falken> <150144503394.20010519085440@proweb.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Re[2]: [9fans] home, end ^h^j^k^l
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Date: Sat, 19 May 2001 22:19:11 +0200
Topicbox-Message-UUID: a23c2f48-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025

From: "Matt H" <matt@proweb.co.uk>
> in windows if you select some text and press backspace you delete the
> selected text. If you select some text in acme it replaces the current
> text with a backspace so it also deletes the character to the left of
> your selected text. So, as you must do, I select one less then the
> ones I want to delete.

no, you hit cut.

plan 9 gets it right, windows gets it wrong.

plan 9 replaces selected text by the typed text.  if the replacement
text is a backspace then it does exactly as advertised.  ie. there is
no special case for backspace.  special cases are a curse.

consider how drag and drop works on windows with the file mangler.
it does a copy if you drag from a: to c: but it does a move if you
drag and drop on c: -- totally counterintuitive.  it would be like
if cp(1) made an excutive decision based on source and target.