Keyboards

[GLS at MIT-AI (Guy L. Steele, Jr.)]

To: JLK at MIT-MC, RLB at MIT-MC
CC: (BUG EMACS) at MIT-AI

[1] I still think it would be a good idea to have soome
keys with "uninterpreted" words on the fronts, like FOO,
GLEEP, BAZ, ZTESCH, etc. which are purposely "undefined"
and yet "mnemonic" in the sense that you can remember them and they
are obviously words and not symbols.
[2] Labelling the lock keys "A", "B", etc. is not a good
idea because of the possible confusion wiht the letter keys.
In this respect the keys labelled with Roman numerals worry me,
because of possible confusion with the I and V keys.  One
somewhat inelegant solution is to use II, III, IV, VI, VII, VIII,
IX, and XI as the labels.
[3] In my previous flamage about editor orthogonality I forgot
to mention the thing that got me started on that subject: I constantly
find myself wanting "transpose line" and "transpose paragraph".
"Transpose comment" would also be extraordinarily useful -- you
could use it to drag comments down a line.
As long as this is going to (BUG EMACS)... another possible
thing a numeric arg could be used for is to indicate how
many of the particular item should be used as a group to be
dragged by the transposition -- thus oone might want to drag
a phrase of three words forward.  One might suggest that a trick
analogous to the kill-command "lookahead" (really lookbehind)
used to consolidate the kill ring entries could be used so that
<number> <transpose> <transpose> <transpose> would drag <number>
things forward three units.  I would suggest simply a
variant that dragged the region along, but that doesn't quite
work for comments, which are not contiguous -- one ooftem
wants too drag three comments down together two lines.
Right now this operation is tedious.
Dare I suggestthat on the new keyboards
Roman numbers anGreek numbers accumulate two separate numeric
args for commands???
[End of continued flamage]