[To reply replace "Aaron.Sloman.XX" with "A.Sloman"]
Stephen Isard <S.IsardDeleteThis@ed.ac.uk> points out that my
proposal needs some further thought:
> Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 17:30:45 +0100
> Organization: HCRC or CCS, University of Edinburgh
[AS]
> > found it useful to extend the linuxkeys.p file to enable
> > the function keys F1, F2, etc. to be used as we use them in
> > XVed and Ved at birmingham, namely:
> >
> > F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 F7
> > +--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+
> > | MARK | MARK | DELETE | DELETE | DELETE | DELETE | DELETE |
> > | BEGIN | END | LINE <-| LINE | LINE-> | WORD <-| WORD-> |
> > +--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+--------+
[SI]
> This is the setup I'm familiar with on my sun, and I'm happy to use it
> under linux, but I think it is a good idea to keep the standard key
> bindings the same for the console and xterms. In the README of your new
> linuxterm.tar.gz, you suggest that this is what you are doing. There is
> a section that starts:
>
> HELP NCDXTERMKEYS Revised Aaron Sloman Sept 1998
>
> This file depicts how VED and XVED use keyboards at Birmingham, ...
>
> However, that is not how HELP NCDXTERMKEYS starts on my sun, on my linux
> machine - both of which have poplog 15.53 as downloaded from Birmingham
> - nor in
> http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/doc/pophelp/ncdxtermkeys. In
> all of those
> places the header is
>
> HELP NCDXTERMKEYS Robert Smith, Oct 1989
Apologies. I had forgotten that for many years here at Birmingham we
have been ignoring the defaults in the "official" function key
mappings and instead set up the convention I summarised above, to
work uniformly across all our Suns, Xterminals, PCs using eXceed,
PCs running linux, etc., whether using Ved or XVed. (I believe Ved
worked that way on some terminals at Sussex, but not all.)
Having forgotten that it was a local decision, I have been acting as
if that's how Poplog works!
If there are no objections I would propose (when I find time) to try
to convert all the Ved key-binding files to work according to that
standard, leaving the old configurations available for those who
want them, in files with 'old' in their names.
One problem is that many of the keyboards are no longer in use here,
so testing would be difficult. E.g. nobody has Sun3 keyboards
anymore, and I suspect there are very few Sun type 4 keyboards
(which lack the central key cluster).
Another nasty problem. I grew up with the Delete key being used to
delete the last key typed, and the backspace key (generating Ctrl H)
used to move the typing head one space left without deleting
anything. Ved kept the delete key as vedchardelete and the backspace
key as vedcharleft.
As a result of the spread of PCs, and the introduction of VDUs with a
left arrow making that use of backspace redundant, the vast majority of
users now expect the backspace key to perform the vedchardelete
function. Some also expect the Delete key to perform the veddotdelete
function, i.e. delete character UNDER the cursor.
I don't personally like this but feel that we have to make that
change to the defaults in order to make things easy for beginners.
Old-timers will know how to convert the key bindings to anything
they want.
> ....
>
> If you have a later version of ncdxtermkeys.p with the new bindings, I
> think it would be a good idea to package it and its help file together
> with your new vedlinuxkeys.p, so that any linux user who installs the
> package will get uniform behaviour in their
> console and xterm windows.
Agreed. Another complication which I had forgotten is that we have
for many years been using a version of .Xdefaults which is used to
alter the xterm and XVed settings. It is in
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/setup/Poplib/Xdefaults.poplog
Or, if you have fetched the setup.tar.gz, look in
setup/Poplib/Xdefaults.poplog
I shall have to do some experimenting to find out what happens if
that is turned off, so as to find out how the rest of the world has
been experiencing Ved and XVed.
Our version has been in use in Birmingham for about 8 or 9 years by
undergraduates, MSc students, PhD students, at least one secretary,
and academic and research staff (the small subset who use Ved rather
than Emacs) with no problems. I have heard that in other places
there were complaints that different terminals had different
keymappings, but am not sure.
It would be useful if any Ved user reading this could check what
keybindings they have for Ved and Xved for the function keys F1 to
F12 (some of which do nothing on some terminals), and post them,
specifying what terminal they are using, and on which machine
and operating system poplog is running.
I have no idea about windows poplog which I never use as a don't use
a Windows PC.
The easiest way to get at the key bindings is to do
ENTER hkey RETURN
then press the function key. It will print the name of the
corresonding ved function and a description.
There is a program due to Steve Leach in 1995 (then Steve Knight)
which is ved_keymap, which prints out a complete key mapping, but
only in terms of how character sequences map onto Ved procedures. It
cannot tell which function keys produce which character sequences.
It is in
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/auto/ved_keymap.p
I believe Jonathan Cunningham once produced a related utility, but
I cannot find it.
Aaron
====
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk (ReadATas@please !)
PAPERS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/
FREE TOOLS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html
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