[Info-vax] Keypad state in various VMS utilities

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <3a77c8ba-b675-47db-9e16-0682af8f721an at googlegroups.com>,
David Jones <osuvman50 at gmail.com> writes: 

> I use SMG all the time solely for its virtual keyboard recall buffer
> feature. I never see the keypad being put in application mode unless I
> create a key table and include it as an argument in the read call. I
> rarely find it worth the trouble to define application keypad keys in
> command line interfaces (as opposed to screen oriented interfaces).

I use the keypad in EDT (OK, screen oriented), MAIL and NEWSRDR (in
addition to the EDT keypad when using EDT within those applications),
which I guess are command-line interfaces, probabably several hours a
day (and, occasionally, the debugger as well) and have been doing so for
more than a quarter of a century, which means that I have saved a huge
amount of time thanks to the application keypad, and why a real VMS
keyboard is a necessity for me.  Of course, people who never learned to
type blindly with ten fingers have probably wasted so many years of
their life already that the relative benefit from a keypad (which should
also be used with, if not 10, then 5 fingers, and blindly) is probably
minimal.