From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: "Douglas A. Gwyn" Message-ID: <3ABF5D54.B549A18B@arl.army.mil> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <20010326141213.E674A19A08@mail.cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] sam mod for delete-forward Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 15:37:34 +0000 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 73ce8c96-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 rob pike wrote: > I'm nervous about this because rio can't do the same thing, and if you > get in the habit in sam place you'll be sorry in rio when you kill the > process. I regret the different interpretations of ESC and don't want > to make another mistake like that. I appreciate the point. It is a pity that the industry didn't agree on standard uses for control keystrokes. Actually DEL is RUBOUT, which should be ignored since it is where the punched paper tape was backspaced and overpunched to remove an erroneous character. ESC is supposed to introduce a *sequence* of characters. Etc. I'm not sure why the early Unix use of DEL to generate an INTR signal was carried into Plan 9, but frankly it seems like a poor choice. ETX (^C) is a semi-standard for this function, just as DEL deletes forward in most text processors these days. I doubt you want to go the X11-init-file route, but it might be useful to employ *some* sort of functional key map, defaulting to whatever you think is best. Then sam, rio, and other apps could be uniformly coded to test for the key corresponding to the function Delete-Word-Backward, Delete-Char-Forward, Generate-Signal, etc. instead of hard-wiring the functions. I know that hard-wired functions make it easier to use somebody else's environment, but I don't think that trumps the desire to be able to switch among Plan 9 and other OSes without having to retrain one's fingers. I just realized that while preparing this message under Solaris with Netscape's Compose window, I used DEL for delete-forward several times.