emacs@ICS.UCI.EDU (Emacs Editor Maintenance, agent: Scott Menter) (05/15/86)
I've just finished bringing up GNU Emacs on our VAX 11/750s with 4.2BSD here at UCI. Everything seems to be going fine, but I had the following thoughts in learning how to use GNU Emacs (I'm an old Gosling fan) about a couple of issues that arose: ^H (or, in GNU jargon, C-h): In the INSTALL file of the 17.61 distribution, RMS writes: > > The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by > the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another > character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion > of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to > overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming > to it. : : > You may ... wish to put the function help-command on some > other key. I leave to you the task of deciding which key. > As one of those "confused" individuals, I'd just like to point out that even if I accept that backspace was not ever meant to be the delete-backward-char character, then it was at least meant to be a reverse cursor moverment character, right? The point is that while it is arguably correct that C-h ought not be used for deletion, why not give it some meaning that people could more easily intuit, like binding it to backward-char? Personally, I'm going to leave mark-paragraph (default M-h binding) unbound, bind help to M-h, and bind delete-backward-char to C-h as well as DEL. And now for something completely different: when I began the porting of Emacs, I was using a beta test terminal which was emulating an Adm5, whatever that is. On this particular type of terminal, the "so" and "se" termcap characters (standout and standout-end) were the same (ESC-g, I think). So what we really had was one character that toggled from reverse- to normal- video. Apparently, Emacs didn't understand this (not that I blame it!) and so lots of things came out in reverse-video. The solution for me at least was to use a normal terminal, but maybe somebody out there will find it an interesting problem to change Emacs or termcap to deal with such a thing intelligently. Scott Menter (escott@ics.uci.edu) (formerly escott@brandeis)