Good [LWN.net]

Good

Posted Aug 6, 2010 9:33 UTC (Fri) by etienne (guest, #25256)
In reply to: Good by brouhaha
Parent article: GUADEC: A message from the release team

> I wonder who thinks losing Emacs edit bindings is a good thing, and why?

Initially, Microsoft.
It all started when they decided to replace the standard Shift-Delete/Shift-Insert for cut&paste by the much more intuitive Control-C/Control-V.
Not at all related to bother Windows users who try Unix.

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Good

Posted Aug 6, 2010 15:25 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

Actually, Microsoft pinched these shortcuts from Apple. In Apple's original (mid-1980s) Human Interface Guidelines, there is an explanation of the rationale behind the shortcuts. One must admit that »Control-C« for »copy« does make a certain amount of sense, while the wedge-shaped letter »V« in »Control-V« is supposed to suggest squeezing something in at some point, hence »paste«. Doesn't seem all that stupid, now does it – unless you're carrying lots of Unix baggage in your head, where »Control-C« means »kill the current process«.

Now Apple may or may not have come up with these by themselves or they may have in turn adopted the usage from the Xerox Star, which inspired the Macintosh GUI by way of the Apple LISA (I wouldn't know), but in this particular instance Microsoft doesn't appear to be the culprit.

Good

Posted Aug 6, 2010 19:18 UTC (Fri) by spitzak (guest, #4593) [Link]

The actual question is why did Microsoft (and the CDE) choose "Ctrl" rather than the "Alt" key to emulate the Apple settings.

Earlier precedence with MSDOS programs (and with X and Andrew) was that "alt+letter" was far more often used to trigger actions. Also the Alt key on the PC at that time was positioned in exactly the same place as the "command" key on a Macintosh. So it would seem a no-brainer to use the Alt key instead.

I have a few theories as to why ctrl was chosen but I don't really know:

1. CDE wanted to work on machines that did not have any extra key other than Ctrl.

2. Non-PC programs designed for serial terminals had to use ctrl+letter for shortcuts, so they may have thought they were being consistent with this (though they were wrong, as they failed to think of the terminal emulator itself as a program). This may also explain the unintuitive use of shift+insert/del to avoid the shortcut key for operations that were not supported by older terminals.

3. Microsoft wanted existing MSDOS programs to be easily ported to run in a window. Since most were using Alt+letter for shortcuts they used ctrl to avoid interfering.

4. Some foreign keyboards were using the Alt key for typing non-ASCII letters (though was this actually prevalent in 1986?)

If anybody has the real reason, it would be interesting.

Good

Posted Aug 9, 2010 9:08 UTC (Mon) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (1 responses)

Personally, I really found the new combinations much better when Microsoft introduced them. I never managed to learn Shit+Delete, most of the time I wanted to copy (Ctrl+Insert), not cut, and Ctrl+C followed by Ctrl+V was so much easier than Ctrl+Insert followed by Shift+Insert.

Specially nice was that Cut (X), Copy (C) and Paste (V) are all together in the QWERTY keyboard, and all are enabled by the Ctrl key. By contrast, Shift+Del, Ctrl+Insert, Shit+Insert are simply more cumbersome.

And I think the exact think could be said about that Emacs and Vi key bindings too. They may be useful for the small part of the World that is the Emacs (and Vi) heavy user community, but bring nothing to the vast majority of us.

Good

Posted Aug 9, 2010 19:32 UTC (Mon) by brouhaha (guest, #1698) [Link]

I'm not at all suggesting that Windows-like (or Mac-like) key bindings should be removed. I'm just complaining that emacs-like bindings shouldn't be removed either. If there's an issue with them, then there should be a setting somewhere to select them.

Some of us have been using Emacs for longer than Windows has existed.