Re: New keyboards

[MOON@MIT-MC]

CC: (BUG LISPM) at MIT-MC, GLS at MIT-MC, RLB at MIT-MC
Yeah, the layout is acceptable I guess.

You're right that CLEAR INPUT shouldn't be just CLEAR, maybe CLR INP or
CLR KBD.

Bright green is a loss, very pale green would be OK.

COMMAND is for "system commands".  Perhaps meta-X will provide this function,
or a similar non-separate key.  MACRO is for keyboard macros; currently we
are using back-next for this.  This needs to be a separate key so it isn't
typed accidentally and so it doesn't interfere with anything else.  It wouldn't
really be a win to use TERMINAL ESCAPE for this function also, in my opinion.

I suppose there's some point to a YES key, although dangerous questions
like that should of course flush type-ahead.  Anyway I suppose the COMMAND
key isn't necessary (although a long time ago we were thinking of relabelling
VT for this.)  But I do think it's important to find a place for a MACRO key.
Should the lozenge printing character that we use for altmode appear
some place?  How does QUIT differ from CALL? Since apparently FLUSH
is FLUSH OUTPUT rather than FLUSH PROGRAM and probably should be labelled
as such.

I'd never heard that TOP was confusing people.  I think SYMBOL could be
confused with the Lisp symbol data-type, and GREEK isn't good since now
it's being used for non-greek characters as well, like cent-sign.  That's
why I think TOP and FRONT would be better names for those shifts.

Since the keycodes and which keys are shift-keys depends entirely on the
micro-processor, all that really has to be settled now is where there are
keys, how wide, and which ones lock, which we seem to be all agreed on.
I don't know how far in advance the keytops need to be ordered.