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Re: emacs -nw keypad, tpu-edt.el, and C-h


On 5/28/2009 1:10 PM, Andy Koppe wrote:
Could the default for the terminals be changed? Yes, easily, but only
at the cost of breaking any applications that always expect ^H for
Backspace.

Sorry, I guess I haven't been expressing myself very well. I wasn't suggesting any particular course of action, and I certainly don't want to break other applications. I'm simply describing the symptoms and asking what can be done to make emacs work as well as possible for cygwin users. I'm thinking of users who are experienced with emacs on other platforms and are startled when C-h doesn't work as they expected, as well as new emacs users who see a splash screen telling them to type C-h for help and then find that it doesn't work.


Let me start over and try to be more clear.

I almost always use emacs under X, where, by default, C-h is the help key (as advertised on the emacs splash screen) and the Backspace key behaves the way one would expect. If you start emacs under X and type 'C-h k <backspace>' (which is asking emacs to tell you what the backspace key does), you get the following response:

DEL (translated from <backspace>) runs the command...

So emacs knows you've hit the backspace key and knows how it should be interpreted, whereas C-h (pressing h while holding down control) is treated as the help key.

In the course of trying to debug Tim's problem that started this thread, I had occasion to use emacs in various text terminals, and I was surprised to find that, by default, emacs behaves differently in that setting. (One has to use F1 for help instead of C-h, and there's no distinction between C-h and <backspace>.)

This difference does *not* occur in the one linux system that I have access to (which happens to be Redhat linux). If I log into the console on that machine and start emacs (with no window system running), C-h is help and <backspace> is DEL.

It would be nice if we could get emacs on cygwin to work the same way it does on other platforms. If it can't be done without breaking other things, so be it. In that case, as I said before, I'll try to change the splash screen to say that F1 is the help key (when emacs is started in a context where C-h doesn't function as the help key). It might actually be an emacs bug that this doesn't happen automatically; I've asked about this on the emacs-devel list (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2009-05/msg00569.html).

Ken

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