Decent Unix Editors!! (one man's opinion, anyway)

[msucats]

In article <1991Apr25.083732.6664 at zorch.SF-Bay.ORG>, Kent writes:

> The more important point is still not understood, however -- no
> commercial product worth its price would be released with a braindead
> misfeature like the rape of the backspace key

VMS does not allow any obvious kind of remapping of ^H to DEL either.

> disabling "out of the box" use of GNU emacs for much of the world, yet
> repeated calls over several years to the keepers of GNU emacs have
> elicited no change whatever -- this bogosity is graven in stone
> because the keyboard of the implementer of GNU emacs happens to have
> DEL where over half the keyboards in the world have BS, and that
> settles the issue.

This isn't a justification, but an explanation:

...however, a good number of hackers in the world use, or have used,
systems where DEL means delete-to-the-left and can't be remapped.  It
was just Un*x's bad luck to allow DEL to do this instead of forcing #
upon the user. :-) The standard drives out the configurable. 

I bet Emacs v19 is shipped with the swap easily available, tho.  I was
really annoyed by switching back and forth too, until I was forced to
settle on a single delete-to-the-left key for all the systems I use.  

> By this single example do I destroy the claim that the CopyLeft paradigm
> of programming has anything useful to offer the software marketplace, and
> fully defend George Harrison's right to find emacs less than ideal.

By this single example do I destroy the claim that DEC has anything
useful to offer the software marketplace, and fully defend your right
to complain vigorously to the FSF.

Jay Carlson
msucats at att1.mankato.msus.edu