From owner-freebsd-current Sat Mar 4 10:01:06 1995 Return-Path: current-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id KAA04924 for current-outgoing; Sat, 4 Mar 1995 10:01:06 -0800 Received: from aero.org (aero.org [130.221.16.2]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with ESMTP id KAA04918 for ; Sat, 4 Mar 1995 10:01:04 -0800 Received: from antares.aero.org ([130.221.192.46]) by aero.org with SMTP id <111161-2>; Sat, 4 Mar 1995 10:00:21 -0800 Received: from anpiel.aero.org by antares.aero.org (4.1/AMS-1.0) id AA25989 for freebsd-current@freebsd.org; Sat, 4 Mar 95 10:00:06 PST To: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: backspace now broken In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 04 Mar 1995 04:35:58 PST." <199503041235.HAA07031@starkhome.cs.sunysb.edu> Date: Sat, 4 Mar 1995 10:00:04 -0800 From: "Mike O'Brien" Message-Id: <95Mar4.100021pst.111161-2@aero.org> Sender: current-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Gene Stark says: > The PC keyboard has two keys: "<-" and "Delete". When I walk up to such > a keyboard, I expect "<-" to generate 0x8 and "Delete" to generate 0x3f. I'm in agreement on this one, as I've said. Thinking it over last night, I realized that others feel equally passionately the other way - their keyboards seem saner to them after this change. Using kernel calls to change single key mappings smacks to me of special pleading and bad design. I would suggest that it might make sense to be able to switch between entire well- publicized key mapping tables, something like the Microsoft "code pages". Plan Nine, out of Bell Labs, which could logically be regarded as the successor to UNIX, is now a Unicode system, with 16-bit characters. I certainly don't suggest we go that far, but a selection of well-chosen key mapping tables would go far to satisfy the needs of the international community, which in the absence of ISO character set capability has gone over to remapping the ASCII character set to a variety of national character sets. Just a suggestion. I do know that on my system, the Backspace key is going to generate ASCII 0x08. I'd prefer to do this via a judicious call in /etc/rc.boot rather than by changing the kernel source with every release. Mike O'Brien