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Re: Poll about proposed change in DEL (aka Backspace) and Delete


From: MBR
Subject: Re: Poll about proposed change in DEL (aka Backspace) and Delete
Date: Tue, 04 Oct 2011 10:08:00 -0400
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.20) Gecko/20110804 Thunderbird/3.1.12

Suvayu,

I don't think so.  What Richard wrote was:

"a change is being considered for ASCII DEL (on most keyboards, the Backspace key) and the Delete function key."

ASCII DEL is 0x7F (decimal 127).  As Richard says, on most keyboards that's the key whose keycap says "Backspace".  It's usually on the far right of the keyboard in the row that contains the digits 1-9 and 0.  He also refers to "the Delete function key".  That's the key whose keycap says "Delete".  That's usually somewhere near Insert, Home, End, Page Up, and Page Dn.

I hardly ever use the Delete function key.  But I use Backspace to delete 1 character backward all the time.  I'd guess several times a minute.  This change would mess up my typing bigtime!  I'd guess that it would be a year or two before I stopped accidentally typing Backspace and expecting it to delete 1 character backward.
Mark

On 10/4/2011 3:33 AM, suvayu ali wrote:
Hi Mark,

On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 6:28 AM, MBR <mbr@arlsoft.com> wrote:
If I understand the proposal correctly, the idea is to bind the function

      
normally bound to C-w to the BACKSPACE key and the Delete key.  Have I got
that right?

As things currently stand, there are three different kinds of delete
functionality I use: delete 1 character backward, delete 1 character
forward, and delete the marked region.  For over 25 years I've been used to
those functions being invoked by BACKSPACE, C-d, and C-w respectively.  Yes,
I could retrain myself, just as I had to do years ago when IBM put the CTRL
key in the wrong place.  But it will inevitably be a big pain.

I think you are misunderstanding the change. The proposal says if
there is an active region, pressing the DEL key would delete either
the active region (if present) or one character forward. You can still
use C-w instead, the difference being using DEL won't append the text
to the kill ring but C-w will.

To try out this behaviour, you can use Emacs 24 pretest or the BZR
head. I hope this clears up the proposal.


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