[Info-vax] VT keyboard replacement

[Lawrence D’Oliveiro]

On Tuesday, November 9, 2021 at 11:41:01 AM UTC+13, Slo wrote:
> I'm aware of Emac's power, but how does it manage to grab all those 
> CTRL combos from the terminal driver?

cfmakeraw, I guess <https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/manpages-dev/termios.3.en.html>.

And it does better than that: I just tried running it as a non-GUI app via an SSH session to a remote machine, and it was able to pick up the alt and meta key modifiers as well.

> That was extremly productive -- using the main keyboard for input 
> an total control.

I like the fact that we have more keys available nowadays. For example, I have “+” and “-” on the numeric keypad defined to jump forward and backward between section-header comments.

What’s a section-header comment? Well, back in my early student days, I was exposed to a fair amount of PDP-11 assembly code which used “;+” and ”;-” to demarcate blocks of comments at the start of sections of code. I liked the idea so much, I use the convention to this day. In languages where the line-comment initiator is “#” (like Python or bash) I use “#+” and “#-”. But Emacs being Emacs, I can define a single pair of commands which will cope with all these possibilities (and others).

> ... for some time, folks would remap the Caps Lock key to CTRL, but eventually all
> software using the cross died away -- because of some idiot keyboard designer, 
> who never touch-typed or programmed.

Don’t most editors allow you to remap key bindings, like Emacs does?