Re: PROPOSAL: Repurpose one key and reserve it for third-party packages

[Thibaut Verron]

2021-02-09 18:19 UTC+01:00, Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org>:
>
>>> How about C-\ or C-^? Historically these were used as substitutes for
>>> C-s and C-q when editing via serial lines (and there's still a function
>>> enable-flow-control that activates it). Certainly that's no longer a
>>> frequent use case?
>>
>> C-\ is used to set the input method.  But we could move that
>> functionality to C-^, and then give up C-\ to third party packages.
>>
>
> Except that \ is hard to type on most keyboards: C and \ are the two most
> distant keys on the most widespread keyboard layout (QWERTY), and on other
> keyboards \ requires pressing Shift or AltGr.

I don't quite get how you reach that conclusion about the qwerty keyboard.

On my ISO102 qwerty keyboard, \ is diagonally adjacent to left control
(regardless of whether it's at its original position or on capslock),
and there is another \ left of RET, so two keys above, one left of
right control.

With an ANSI keyboard, it's only available on one key, which is 3 keys
above right control.

So in both cases, I don't think it qualifies as "the most distant key"
from control. To the contrary, I'd say that it is too close to it to
be comfortable to type if you don't use different hands for modifier
and key.

And while \ indeed is a pain to type on non-qwerty layouts, on an
azerty keyboard, the corresponding keys are < and *, both of which are
free with a C- modifier.
On a qwertz it's < and $, which again are free with a C- modifier.

(Those are the keyboards I can look at here, I don't know how it generalizes.)