across terminals

[PPAATT]

> Date: 4/20/02 11:28:15 AM MDT
> From: address@hidden (Richard Stallman)
...
> Since such characters are not available
> on all terminals, ...
> People won't want to use these keys
> in major modes or minor modes
> meant for general use.

I remain mystified by this concise statement,
but I've thought up a new way to interpret it ...

A quick glance thru:

        http://www.google.com/search?q=iso+646+vs+ascii

in particular:

        http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars.html#646
        http://pdc.ro.nu/teletext.html

suggests that keyboards designed by ISO 646 folk
might have keys labelled with the "invariant set" of
printable US Ascii minus the thirteen chars
# $ @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~
(i.e.  x  23 24  40  5B 5C 5D 5E 5F 60  7B 7C 7D 7E). 

So across Europe & relations maybe we face
"not available on all terminals" issues
in the default Emacs keymap with the "C-c letter"
concept we have been elucidating in our thread
titled "bindings reserved for users" but then also with:

set-mark-command is on C-@, C-SPC
key ESC is on C-[
abort-recursive-edit is on C-]
toggle-input-method is on C-\
undo C-_, C-/

ispell-word M-$
mark-word is on M-@
delete-horizontal-space is on M-\
delete-indentation is on M-^
tmm-menubar is on M-`
backward-paragraph is on C-up, M-{
shell-command-on-region is on M-|
forward-paragraph is on C-down, M-}
not-modified is on M-~

Fun to see how many of these we have
(and have not) already bound to alternate
key sequences, not to mention mouse actions etc.

I remember in particular that C-h t help-with-tutorial
bemoans the difficulty of finding locally how to undo,
hence we have C-x u advertised-undo (also known as
the undo that C-h w undo does Not advertise).

Pat LaVarre