Backspace vs. Del

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Tue May 7 18:48:39 UTC 2002


Ned Konz <ned at bike-nomad.com> wrote:
> On Sunday 05 May 2002 11:32 am, Markus Fritsche wrote:
> 
> > How can I change the behavior of the key <del> to "delete right of
> > cursor"?
> 
> Use the Sourceforge VM. The troublesome mapping has been removed 
> there.
> 
> The mapping of 127->8 was apparently an attempt to work around 
> misconfiguration of X keyboard mappings on some systems.
> 
> Of course, the real answer is not to try to fix X configuration 
> problems in Squeak. We could, however, have some information on how 
> to fix those problems on the Swiki.
> 

Actually it's more complicated than that.  127 is actually the correct
mapping for backspace.  8 is the misconfiguration.  So the correct thing
to do is to map X's 127 to Squeak's 8.  Now, delete doesn't even have an
ASCII character at all.  So you might as well let 8 also map to 8.

Now do you think you can actually convince someone that 127 is correct
for backspace, to reconfigure their "misconfigured" system?

Anyway, it's clear that different people map these keys differently, and
that different people feel strongly in each direction.  Further, there
is the matter of the delete key, which doesn't even have a mapping at
all on many people's systems.  However, you don't actually have to do
the ASCII translation.  Consider thingcs like up-arrow, which have no
possible ASCII mapping anyway.  The most direct thing seems to be to
treat backspace and delete just the way things like up-arrow are
treated: look at the symbolic keysym, and don't even look at the ASCII
translation.

-Lex



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