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Re: [Bug-apl] Another option for APL keyboard mapping


From: David B. Lamkins
Subject: Re: [Bug-apl] Another option for APL keyboard mapping
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2014 23:24:19 -0700

Interesting. I knew about the high-bit controls, but honestly can't
remember the last time I saw a system that used them. Aside from xterm
(given appropriate configuration), are high-bit controls used on any of
your available platforms?

On Thu, 2014-10-23 at 14:09 +0800, Elias Mårtenson wrote:
> If you have never seen anything else, then I must assume that you
> haven't looked hard enough. :-)  In fact, the usual way was to simply
> set the high bit to 1 to indicate Alt. Emacs implemented a workaround
> for terminals that did not support this (the Esc-prefix) and many
> terminal emulators have adopted this these days, making it full-circle
> if you will.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Elias
> 
> On 23 October 2014 14:06, David B. Lamkins <address@hidden> wrote:
>         Thanks, Elias.
>         
>         I was inspired by what I saw coming out of `showkey`, so I
>         looked at the
>         source and realized that the foundation was very simple. The
>         only really
>         tricky part was distinguishing between the ANSI CSI (a
>         two-character
>         prefix of all ANSI cursor and function keys) and the APL `←`
>         which is
>         identical to the CSI but has nothing following until the next
>         key press.
>         
>         Like you, I had a moment where I thought this ought to be
>         integrated in
>         GNU APL. Then I realized that GNU APL needs to see the Unicode
>         representation of the APL characters so that curses can do the
>         right
>         thing with the cursor keys.
>         
>         That said, I'd be happy to share `akt` as a contribution to
>         the
>         "keyboards" section of the GNU APL distribution.
>         
>         I don't understand your concern regarding ESC as a prefix. ESC
>         prefixing
>         has been consistently available in all of the terminal
>         emulators I've
>         seen in the past decade or more on Macs, PCs and many flavors
>         of Linux.
>         I'd be surprised if that feature suddenly disappeared.
>         
>         Even if one did encounter a terminal emulator that doesn't map
>         Alt to an
>         ESC prefix, one may always type the ESC key as a prefix...
>         
>         It'd be easy to allow specification of a different
>         single-character
>         prefix, but I don't understand the need. What am I missing?
>         Something
>         having to do with the layout of non-US keyboards...? Non-ANSI
>         terminal
>         emulators...? Personal preference...?
>         
>         I do plan to look into curses, but that solution has a larger
>         "surface
>         area". `akt` was just a quick and simple hack to have a
>         lightweight
>         keyboard mapper while I slowly wrap my head around curses for
>         a
>         different project.
>         
> 
> 





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