Delete key

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014, Fairlight wrote:
>On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 04:49:49PM -0400, J. P. Radley thus spoke:
>> My fingers just aren't quick enough to replicate what you're seeing in
>> mutt.
>> 
>> Let's talk about vi, where Esc-V is also a useful sequence.
>> Do you see something similar there?
>
>It goes into visual mode right away, no matter how fast I press the keys.
>Mind you, I'm using vim, not stock vi.  
>
>If I'm in visual mode, it delays getting out of visual mode if I just press
>escape and nothing after it, though.  :)

ESC was intended at being the beginning of an escape sequence, never
designed to stand alone.  As usual, Microsoft corrupted this decades ago in
their usual ignorance of communications standards.  WordStar displayed
similar ignorance when it used ctrl-s (XOFF) as cursor control, as did
Scripsit which I think used ctrl-S to start a search, and the Radio Shack
Model 12 keyboard had a function key around the numeric keypad that sent
XOFF.  I don't know how many calls I got from customers with new Model 12s
and 16s complaining that their Xenix keyboards locked up.

Profile II and FilePro used ESC-ESC originally as that completed the
command started with ESC.

When I wrote my screen handling routines for my Unify RDBMS based
accounting system I used function keys based on the FilePro usage as that's
what my customers were accustomed to.  I did allow for synonyms for various
functions like SAVE so that one could save a screen by pressing ESC-ESC,
F4, or PageDown which are near the numeric keypad on the old VT-100, Wyse,
and 101-key PC keyboards so the operator could do efficient data entry with
one hand on the 10-key.

There are options in termcap and terminfo to specify the delay time for
various functions which could be useful in the days of slow serial links
(remember when 2,400 baud was considered fast :-).

Back in the days before [n]curses was available, many people had to write
their own routines to interpret function keys and such.  I certainly did,
when I wrote my accounting software 30 years ago.  I don't remember the
details, but I did have to deal with timing issues.  It's still working
today, but I would hate to have to go back to my "C" code to figure out
what I did.

Bill
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