The control/meta keys actually date back to Professor Wirth at Stanford. The Stanford keyboard had control/meta then. MIT then had it in the form of the Knight keyboard.
(C) 1978 by Guy L. Steele, Jr.
(Sung to the tune of "Rubber Duckie")
Double bucky, you're the one!
You make my keyboard lots of fun
Double bucky, an additional bit or two:
(Vo-vo-de-o!)
Control and Meta side by side,
Augmented ASCII, nine bits wide!
Double bucky, a half a thousand glyphs,
plus a few!
Oh,
I sure wish that I
Had a couple of
bits more!
Perhaps a
Set of pedals to
Make the number of
Bits four:
Double double bucky!
Double bucky, left and right
OR'd together, outta sight!
Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of
Double bucky, I'm happy I heard of
Double bucky, I'd like a whole
word of you!
Alt -> Control
Windows-key and Menu Key -> Alt
Control keys -> Windows key
So without having ever seen a Symbolics keyboard and without knowing the history behind emacs keyboard layout I remapped my keyboard so that I had very quick access to Control and Alt (= Meta) keys.
On my Macbook it's not that easy. I could remap the Command key to become a Control key, but many Mac shortcuts heavily rely on the Command key. So that's no option.
I was using Linux and StumpWM (a Common Lisp/Emacs-based WM, and Enlightenment before that) for a couple of years, so I thought that full support for personal keymaps is a given in any serious computing environment. I was pretty shocked to learn that on Mac OS you can do very little keybinding, if exchanging a few keys positions can be even called that. Fortunately, it looks like I'm going back to Linux soon.
The new MBPs (possibly anything on Sierra?) add CapsLock as a mapping target and both CapsLock and Esc as a mapped value, presumably to get around only having the soft Esc key in the touchbar. It's also nice for Esc as meta, though.
That obviates the need for Karabiner in the 99% case, though I still use Keyboard Maestro for macro and text expansion.
Is anyone selling keyboards like this? What happened to those really expensive customizable keyboards from a few years back?
That's my number one piece of advice after two decades of Emacsing and one on a Japanese keyboard.
Japanese keyboards have a much shorter space bar with extra keys on either side. Remap these to control, hit them with your thumbs, and experience bliss.
I used to get 'Emacs pinky' quite frequently, but never since the switch. If you think about it, it makes all kinds of sense:
- your thumbs are strong and dextrous but totally underused in a traditional layout - most space bars are ridiculously large.. wasted real estate - your non-spacebar thumb can comfortably rest on a ctrl key so there's often no lateral movement at all
Fascinating to see others thinking along the same lines as me with keyboard remapping, and also to discover that all this time we've been trying to get closer to the keyboards of antiquity!
The point being that there is a bit of a tradition of using "." for "the current thing" so there's a sort of sense in using it for the most recent command.
If you're really curious get in touch with Bill Joy.
I would really like a modal editor in which I could configure the behavior for each key, maybe even define more modes and composable functions.
4coder is still very alpha at this point is easy to break but the low level primitives exposed leave it open for easy experimentation with little cruft to peal away first. It also very C++ focused so YMMV.
:help map.txtIn Emacs, it's really hard to create completely different keybindings, because as soon as you enter a new mode, it defines the same original keybindings for new behavior.
Rubout was a different concept entirely. The ASR33 had a paper tape punch and reader. The Rubout character was 0x7F, i.e., it had all bits set. So, to "rub out" an erroneous character from the paper tape, you could back the tape up in the punch to the desired character (by pressing a button on the punch; there was no character that invoked this function) and hit Rubout; this would punch the tape at all seven holes, changing whatever character had been there to a Rubout. (The software ignored Rubout characters on input.)
When the world moved on from Teletypes, it was natural for people to want a single keystroke that meant "delete the previous input character". But there was evidently some divergence of opinion in the industry as to whether that should be Backspace or Rubout -- notwithstanding that the ASR33's concept of Rubout didn't really map at all onto the new hardware.
> notwithstanding that the ASR33's concept of Rubout didn't
> really map at all onto the new hardware.
That leaves Backspace as the natural choice for entering ‘backward delete’ on a keyboard, at least after 1979 when you have the ANSI X3.64 escape sequences for explicitly nondestructive cursor keys. I think there's a reasonable argument for Backspace being nondestructive for overstrike effects (accents, underlining, APL, etc.), especially when received by a terminal, but I know none for changing the meaning of DEL.
Exactly what a typewriter would do because it couldn't erase the ink on the paper.