across terminals

across terminals

[PPAATT]

> Date: 4/20/02 11:28:15 AM MDT
> From: rms@gnu.org (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

Re: across terminals

[Richard Stallman]

I have never seen a terminal that did not have these characters:
  # $ @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~

If they do exist, they must be rare, so I don't think
they should be a major factor in our decisions.

If a large number of such terminals do exist, please
let me know.

Re: across terminals

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Thu, 25 Apr 2002, Richard Stallman wrote:

> I have never seen a terminal that did not have these characters:
>   # $ @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~
> 
> If they do exist, they must be rare

Unfortunately, this isn't true: many national keyboards in Europe don't 
have keys for some of those ( {, |, and } seem to be most prone to 
this).  You need to press some AltGr-key combination to get them.  IIRC,
\ and _ have some issues on Japanese keyboards.

I remember that someone told me SIGQUIT was a pain in some European 
country (Germany?) because you need a combination of keys to produce \.

Re: across terminals

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Eli" == Eli Zaretskii <eliz@is.elta.co.il> writes:

    Eli> IIRC, \ and _ have some issues on Japanese keyboards.

Yes, although the list is \ (the code point maps to YEN SYMBOL), ~
(OVERBAR), and | (BROKEN BAR = U+00A6).

There's another problem that I've occasionally encountered, is that my
muscle memory knows where "the key that invokes eval-expression" is in
a way that isn't entirely linked to "where : is".  Non-US keyboards
tend to move punctuation around a lot.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
 My nostalgia for Icon makes me forget about any of the bad things.  I don't
have much nostalgia for Perl, so its faults I remember.  Scott Gilbert c.l.py

Localization: keyboards and messages (Re: across terminals)

[Karl Eichwalder]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@is.elta.co.il> writes:

> I remember that someone told me SIGQUIT was a pain in some European 
> country (Germany?) because you need a combination of keys to produce \.

Yes.  Doing localization (L10N) properly would mean a lot of key
re-assignments (that's why I use US keyboards only).

Before re-mapping keys lets solve the message translation problem first.

-- 
ke@suse.de (work) / keichwa@gmx.net (home):              |
http://www.suse.de/~ke/                                  |      ,__o
Free Translation Project:                                |    _-\_<,
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/             |   (*)/'(*)

Re: Localization: keyboards and messages (Re: across terminals)

[Pavel Janík]

   From: Karl Eichwalder <ke@gnu.franken.de>
   Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 17:04:04 +0200

   > Yes.  Doing localization (L10N) properly would mean a lot of key
   > re-assignments (that's why I use US keyboards only).
   > 
   > Before re-mapping keys lets solve the message translation problem first.

Yes, I agree with Karl. Message/text translation is in my opinion the most
wanted feature. We do not have to do the translations, we should only
provide infrastructure. I do not know what is the situation in other
countries, but here in CZ we have many people who are ready to start
translating pieces of texts from Emacs to Czech. They are only waiting to
have the possibility to start...

What other developers think about this? I think we should coordinate the
work on this with people from XEmacs team.
-- 
Pavel Janík

Choose a data representation that makes the program simple.
                  --  The Elements of Programming Style (Kernighan & Plaugher)

Re: across terminals

[Paul Eggert]

> From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@is.elta.co.il>
> Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 14:20:46 +0300 (IDT)
> 
> > I have never seen a terminal that did not have these characters:
> >   # $ @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~
> > If they do exist, they must be rare
> 
> Unfortunately, this isn't true: many national keyboards in Europe don't 
> have keys for some of those ( {, |, and } seem to be most prone to 
> this).  You need to press some AltGr-key combination to get them.

Yes.  For example, according to
<http://www.246.ne.jp/~joe/info/latin1.htm>, the only printable
characters common to all the Western European IBM 106 keyboards are
the ASCII letters, digits, and the following:

  ! " % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; _

The following printable ASCII characters are absent from at least one
keyboard in that list:

  # $ <= > ? @ [ \ ] ^ ` { | } ~

> IIRC, \ and _ have some issues on Japanese keyboards.

We do have a few Japanese keyboards here, and characters like \ are
not a real problem with them.  Japanese users are well aware that the
Yen-sign character is actually an alias for \, so they know that if
the documentation says "Please type C-\" that they should actually
type Control-(yen-sign).  Some Japanese keyboards have both a yen-sign
and a backslash on the key, to indicate the alias.

> I remember that someone told me SIGQUIT was a pain in some European 
> country (Germany?) because you need a combination of keys to produce \.

Yes, and it works the other way sometimes too.  For example, it's a
pain to type a NUL on Unix US English Sun type 5 keyboard
(Control-Shift-2), but it's easier on a Japanese Information Standard
English IBM 106 keyboard (Control-@).

Re: across terminals

[Miles Bader]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> writes:
> There's another problem that I've occasionally encountered, is that my
> muscle memory knows where "the key that invokes eval-expression" is in
> a way that isn't entirely linked to "where : is".

For eval-expression at least, the answer is obvious:  rebind it to
M-ESC, where god intended that it be.  :-|

-Miles
-- 
"I distrust a research person who is always obviously busy on a task."
   --Robert Frosch, VP, GM Research

Re: across terminals

[Richard Stallman]

    > I have never seen a terminal that did not have these characters:
    >   # $ @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~

    Unfortunately, this isn't true: many national keyboards in Europe don't 
    have keys for some of those ( {, |, and } seem to be most prone to 
    this).  You need to press some AltGr-key combination to get them.

I thought the issue was whether the terminal has these characters.
Whether they use AltGr is another question (not particularly relevant
here, I think).

I stand by what I said.  Let's consider this issue closed
and NOT SPEND MORE TIME on it, OK?

Re: Localization: keyboards and messages (Re: across terminals)

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Pavel" == Pavel Jan <Pavel@Janik.cz> writes:

    Pavel> What other developers think about this? I think we should
    Pavel> coordinate the work on this with people from XEmacs team.

Please do talk to XEmacs people about this.  There _is_ some ancient
code aiming toward gettextizing XEmacs, but it's so bitrotted puffs of
dust blow out of the PC every time I compile XEmacs.  (And Ben said
something about clearing it out of the devel branch to make room for
another try, it's so bad.)

I know that Ben would "like to do it right someday", and so would I, FWIW.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
 My nostalgia for Icon makes me forget about any of the bad things.  I don't
have much nostalgia for Perl, so its faults I remember.  Scott Gilbert c.l.py

Re: Localization: keyboards and messages (Re: across terminals)

[Richard Stallman]

Working on message translation is important.  There are important design
questions that were never resolved, such as, what domains should there be
and what parts of Emacs should correspond to them, and what interface
should specify the language (I think a variable should specify this).

Re: Localization: keyboards and messages (Re: across terminals)

[Karl Eichwalder]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [...], what domains should there be and what parts of Emacs should
> correspond to them,

Every mode should have its own domain and the rest should go in 'emacs'
or 'emacs-base'; using gettext tools it is possible to move texts from
one domain (catalog) to the other easily, in case it is necessary.

> and what interface should specify the language (I think a variable
> should specify this).

Initialize the language from the environment if the variable isn't set.


-- 
ke@suse.de (work) / keichwa@gmx.net (home):              |
http://www.suse.de/~ke/                                  |      ,__o
Free Translation Project:                                |    _-\_<,
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/             |   (*)/'(*)

Re: Localization: keyboards and messages (Re: across terminals)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Karl Eichwalder <ke@gnu.franken.de>
> Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2002 20:06:02 +0200
> 
> Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > [...], what domains should there be and what parts of Emacs should
> > correspond to them,
> 
> Every mode should have its own domain and the rest should go in 'emacs'
> or 'emacs-base'; using gettext tools it is possible to move texts from
> one domain (catalog) to the other easily, in case it is necessary.
> 
> > and what interface should specify the language (I think a variable
> > should specify this).
> 
> Initialize the language from the environment if the variable isn't set.

The discussion we had about related problems several months ago
unearthed quite a few issues.  I'd expect any design to somehow
address those issues, before practical work begins.

Interested readers can find the discussions I mentioned in the
emacs-devel archives; start here:

  http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/emacs-devel/2001-December/003666.html