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Date:      Sat, 04 Mar 1995 18:40:54 -0700
From:      Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
To:        terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert)
Cc:        freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: backspace now broken 
Message-ID:  <199503050140.SAA22270@rover.village.org>
In-Reply-To: Your message of Sat, 04 Mar 1995 15:03:52 MST

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: > Okay, some keyboards do just have the <-- on that key, but many also have
: > the word ``backspace'' or ``<-- backspace'' printed on the key.  I have
: > never seen a PC keyboard with that key labeled ``delete''.
: 
: My DEC Rainbow 100+.  8-).

Mine too :-).  That was my first PC, so it colored my thinking on
things.

: The DEL vs. BS argument is, as has been pointed out, pretty specious;
: it's a religious rather than a technical or a user protection issue.

Yes.  It is.  I run my system with <-- generating DEL, but then I have
*ALL* my shells setup to use DEL as delete-previous-character.

Emacs also uses it as its default delete-previous-character, so that's
why I've change the map.

Have a program that is smart enough to generate the swapping of DEL
and BS, CAP LOCK and CONTROL, and maybe Escape and ~`, and that should
cover 99% of the US remapping requirements (for people that still
basically want an QWERTY layout, that is).

Then again, I have the following in my /etc/rc.local, so that I would
never notice a change like this :-).

if [ -r /etc/keymap.sys -a -x /usr/sbin/kbdcontrol ]; then
	/usr/sbin/kbdcontrol -l /etc/keymap.sys
fi

BTW, I don't care what the default is, but PC users might expect <--
to generate BS while Delete generates DEL or some other escape
sequence.

Warner



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