> How about a little historical reminder? When people were looking for
> Emacs on small machines like DOS, Coherent, Atari ST, and QNX,
> MicroEmacs was the most widely used and accepted alternative.
> MicroEmacs eventually lost a large number of users to MicroGNUEmacs
> and Elle, at least partly because the MicroEmacs developers kept
> diddling with the keyboard layout. I finally threw out MicroEmacs
> when it became impossible to reconfigure MicroEmacs to the old
> familiar layout.
>
> The lesson, don't diddle with the default keyboard behaviour,
> especially not in such a way as to make it difficult for people to get
> the old familiar behaviour.
Then again, maybe those programs fell out of favor due to the author(s)
not responding to the wishes of its user base. I doubt the reason for
a program's decline can be attributed only to changes in keybindings.
A program must either evolve or become a legacy product.
Personally, I think making DEL delete forward like C-d is the right
thing to do. But as long as it is configurable, I could care less.
It always surprises me how the smallest changes provoke the most
debate. I see this all the time on the FreeBSD mailing lists. If
someone wants to rewrite the kernel from scratch, no one says a word,
but if someone wants to add an option to "ls", it provokes weeks of
debate.
--
Richard Coleman
coleman(a)math.gatech.edu
