From: Clementson, B. <Bil...@jd...> - 2003-05-01 18:43:38
|
From: Edi Weitz on Thursday, May 01, 2003 12:19 PM > "Clementson, Bill" <Bil...@jd...> writes: [snip] > > Incidentally, does anyone have a list of what characters are ALWAYS > > present on terminals? >=20 > The GNU Emacs Manual (13th edition, printed version) I have here says: >=20 > "On ASCII terminals, there are only 32 possible control > characters. These are the control variants of letters and > `@[]\^_'. In addition, the shift key is meaningless with control > characters: C-a and C-A are the same character, and Emacs cannot > distinguish them." >=20 > But let me re-iterate what someone else has said on c.l.l: Some of > these non-letter characters are very hard to type for localized > keyboards, e.g. on my German keyboard {[]}\|@ can only be reached by > pressing the right ALT key ("AltGr") together with another key. I > guess this is about the same for most European keyboard variants. So, it looks like the best "common denominator" to use is just the=20 characters from "a" - "z" and numbers. [snip] > So, I think you'll have to find a balance between the needs of > terminal users and the needs of users of localized keyboards. I, > personally, never use Emacs over a terminal line... :) Same for me; however, half of all the responses that I have received from c.l.l., the ilisp lists and via email have been from terminal users. So, (for some segment of the ilisp community at least) I=20 would like to provide bindings that work well on a dumb terminal.=20 > Thank you very very much for the enormous amount of work you put into > this. I'm one of those who use only a small percentage of what ILISP > has to offer and one of the reasons is that I haven't taken the time > yet to learn the keybindings. Your effort will be a very good reason > for me to finally do it! You're welcome. I'm quite looking forward to having the new bindings in place too. I found that I used only a relatively small subset of the ilisp bindings before I started this exercise. With more consistency=20 and bindings that are easier to remember, I think that will change=20 for a lot of people (myself included). Bob Rogers' suggestions regarding = the key bindings have made it a lot easier to achieve this consistency=20 and he should get a lot of the credit. -- Bill Clementson |