Re: XEmacs 21 /vs./ my keyboard: I want my DEL back

Rick Campbell writes: For better or worse, users are arriving with different expectations than the old UNIX community. It isn't the fault of these users that they think this way. DEC and minicomputers and dumb terminals were a mainstay of our indoctrination into the profession. Microsoft and desktop PCs are a mainstay of theirs. I agree with a later remark in your message that neither behavior of the DEL key is more obvious than the other. The problem is that we have two different communities that we are trying to serve. We could take the political stance than the Windows community is a closed, market driven community which has done nothing to improve our community, that being the free software community. And using this reasoning, we could refuse to support them and their UI assumptions. After all, we have limited amounts of resources and time and those resources should be spent building up our own community. This is, in a nutshell, my point of view. But with the broadening acceptance of open source products, I'm beginning to see that leaning a little toward the enemy might further our cause in the long term. We can obviously thank the explosion of the Internet for opening those corporate eyes, as no one could miss that the application layer of the Internet is thoroughly infested with open source software. But if we want to keep the attention of rest of the world, we have to bend a little. Fiddling with the DEL key is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. If it will keep otherwise interested people from disgustedly closing their minds to open source solutions, then it is worth it. We don't have many advertising dollars to convince people, so we'll have to persaude them a few at a time. So yeah, I'm framing the issue in a way that makes us into noble Messiahs. It lets me sleep at night. :)