Using iPad with Gotomypc to work filepro at home

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Sep 07, 2012, Walter Vaughan wrote:
>Richard Kreiss wrote:
>
>>No keyboards for any tablets exist with function keys. Both Apple and Google left these out of their OS. 
>>
>>  
>>
>'cause they (function keys) are nonnutritive, and definitely should not 
>have a place at the table in the 2020's.
>
>You should see the looks I get teaching someone they have to hit F1 or 
>F2 to edit characters, since they do know that F1 is supposed to bring 
>up a Help screen in all the other programs they have ever used, it (F1 
>to insert) breaks convention. Or rather the convention left it in the dust.

IMHO, the first idiocy was Microsoft using the ESC key alone to
cancel things.  ESC had been defined for years as 'ESCape to a
command', the first character in a multi-character command (which
is why FilePro properly used ESC-ESC).

Radio Shack Scripsit used mnemonic control keys, ctrl-I to
insert, ctrl-D to delete, which were easy to remember and didn't
require a typist to move fingers off the home keys.

Professional typists and data entry people really don't like to
have to move their fingers far to hit function keys, move mice,
and such.  Shortly after the IBM PC first came out, and people
would come into my X-department at 19th and K in D.C. to look at
machines for word processing.  Usually they brought their office
manager, senior secretary, and I would show them Scripsit on the
Model II with it's keyboard very similar to the IBM Selectric.
Then I would send them around the corner to the IBM product
center to see what they had to offer.  Invariably they would come
back screaming about the horrible IBM keyboards (we won't even
talk about Visicalc users and the PC 'keypad' without cursor keys :-)

>Since we can remap keys, we really should have applications use normal 
>conventions. I'm guilty of not doing this, and setting up nice keyboard 
>controls that make sense to the end user. So shame on me.

When I rewrote my large FilePro POS application using the Unify
RDBMS in the mid '80s, I also wrote my own screen handling
routines to replace the horrible Unify ones.  I used the FilePro
key mappings as that's what people were accustomed to, but added
various aliases to make things more efficient.

These initially were the 4 PF keys above the numeric keypad on
Wyse-50s and other VT-100 style keyboards
F1 -> ctrl-I insert
F2 -> ctrl-D delete
F3 -> ctrl-O clear to end of field
ESC-ESC -> F4 save record

Then on PC style keyboards I added these for the function block
immediately to the left of the keypad:
F1 -> Insert
F2 -> Delete (ctrl-C is the proper way to interrupt)
ESC-ESC -> PageDown within easy reach of the keypad.

Bill
-- 
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