Re: What's happened to M-<tab> `completion-at-point'?

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Richard.

On Fri, May 06, 2022 at 19:19:56 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
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>   > > The change from ncurses-6.2 to ncurses-6.3 broke the Linux console
>   > > keyboard, in that terminfo now directs ESC TAB to be translated to
>   > > backtab.

> Would a few people please volunteer to talk with the ncurses
> developers about what problem they wanted to fix?  Given that this fix
> ha a problem, it would be good to look for another one.  Have people
> identified those who were involved?

It seems that the Linux keyboard layout is very old, and too few
keycodes were envisaged for existing key combinations.  This led to
Meta_Tab being used sometimes for <alt><tab> and sometimes (wrongly in
my view) for <shift><tab>.

Thomas Dickey has tracked down a bug "fix" in SuSE GNU/Linux from (I
think it was) 2007 where someone recorded that the change was made to
assigning <shift><tab> to Meta_Tab, but without noting down any reasons.

TD also justified the change in ncurses-6.3 by saying that the
<shift><tab> key assignment had come to prevail in the main GNU/Linux
distributions, and this change merely reflects current practice.

> The discussion should also include Thomas Dickey <dickey@his.com>,
> the ncurses maintainer.

Thomas Dickey is already in the conversation, having answered a post to
bug-ncurses@gnu.org with Subject: Emacs difficulties in linux console
with ncurses-6.3 caused by kcbt=\E^I.  That thread was cross-posted to
emacs-devel.

The conversation has not yet been resolved.

> -- 
> Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
> Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
> Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
> Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).