Re: Backspace direction reversion

MS> [ I moved this exclusively to xemacs-beta. ] Martin> The only other applications that use Delete to delete backwards are Martin> shells and other Emacsen. Shells are special because of historical Martin> tty legacy braindamage - the only editing possible was backward Martin> deletion, using exactly one designated backward erase key (no way to Martin> define two). MS> *Any* application accepting input from stdio works this way. MS> Passwords, vi command lines, ... And, by the way, shells are special MS> in that I use them all the time. Also, I don't see how converts from MS> FSFmacs are unimportant in this picture. Those apps are running naked in a terminal emulator with no inherent editing capability. It's the terminal emulator that has a legacy problem - there was no provision for forward deletion at all. But I guess I see what you mean. I personally don't have this problem, because I run all my shells in shell buffers, as God intended. If XEmacs is running in a tty, is uses the VERASE setting to be compatible with the user. MS> I'm not arguing whether one behavior or the other is MS> braind-dead---plenty of XEmacs keybindings are braindead. In that MS> sense, there's a *huge* amount of "legacy braindamage" in XEmacs. As MS> long as there's no decision in principle to update the way XEmacs is MS> operated by a keyboard according to more "modern" usage, I don't think MS> it makes sense to change just this little detail. MS> You're talking about your users, but if we really care about them, we MS> should have a survey at least on xemacs-beta to find out. Obviously xemacs-beta folks opinion is important, but much less than usual when the question is making usability decisions for novices. Folks are too inclined to think of what works for THEM, instead of the new user. Martin> Commercial software tends to be Motify, which uses the industry Martin> standard user interface for Backspace and Delete. MS> Well, how many commercial software packages do you use under Unix? MS> The ones I use I would rather not be associated with. Of course, I try to do *everything* with XEmacs, so I don't use a lot of other apps. Martin> New free software will use libraries like GTK or Qt, which I Martin> have never used, but would be surprised if they didn't also Martin> use the industry standard user interface. MS> Note the word "will." We're not there yet. Martin> P.S. Oh, yeah, xedit on Unix (not VM/CMS) does things Steve's way. Martin> An editor I would rather not be associated with. MS> So, you would rather be associated with Windows and Notepad? :-) Yes.