[Info-vax] Keypad state in various VMS utilities

[Jan-Erik Söderholm]

Den 2020-10-05 kl. 18:29, skrev Marc Van Dyck:
> It happens that Phillip Helbigundress to reply formulated :
>> 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. 
> 
> So, nobody else than me is using the DEFINE/KEy feature in DCL to map
> their most often used DCL commands to keypad keys ?
> 

I define symbols. Generally speaking, when I had multiple VMS customers,
I got the habit of defining/expecting as little as possible. Only used
the built in VMS features and command as-is. That way I did not depend
on anything being setup in special ways.