[ On Monday, May 15, 2000 at 14:30:22 (-0700), Ted Lemon wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Backspace key in X (and emacs) 
>
> Those of us who grew up with RSTS/E and TOPS-20 instead of Unix V7 had
> a different experience... :'}

Ah ha!  So that's where it comes from!

I almost had RSTS/E running on my antique PDP-11/34 a few years ago (I
have a full set of 8.x 800BPI tapes!) before I gave up because of heat
problems and the power bill....  I suppose I could run it under an
emulator now, but I'd rather run v7 and 32v under the emulator now that
the source for the "Ancient UNIX" releases is effectively free (SCO
recently dropped the $100 fee in favour of a simple click-through
license agreement ala Netscape).

> There are some problems with this - what really surprises me is how
> stubborn people are about allowing the people who like DEL to use DEL
> and the people who like BackSpace to use BackSpace for the erase
> character, and how many programs require mutually-incompatible hacks
> to make one or the other work.

Yup.  Until X11 came along I argued left, right, and centre to have GNU
Emacs simply look at the current stty settings and "Do The Right
Thing(TM)" (something you could even do with the original "sgtty"
interface, damnit!).

These days with X11 the tricks you can play with xmodmap (and even the
un-initiated can play with tools like xkeycaps) alleviate some of the
problems.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>