The ‘here is’ key
dave.cheney.net
dave.cheney.net
On electromechanical teletypes¹ the answerback message was ‘programmed’ by breaking off tabs from a rotating drum, like an inverse music box.
(This is part of the broader collection of C0 glyphs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_control_characters#Con...)
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_2047
² https://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-S...
http://www.pdp8.net/asr33/pics/main_back.shtml
> In the lower left is the answer back drum. By breaking off the little tabs where you program a 20 character sequence that the teletype can send when the "HERE IS" key is pressed or if enabled when the WRU (ENQ, ascii 5) character is received.
It seems you actually break off the tabs, it's not just a repeatable customizable configuration.
It's a reminder of how painfully hard it was to store data, even in read-only form, prior to the 1970s.
I cannot imagine professionals or casual users who would need quick access to turning caps lock on and off. When you need caps lock over shift, it is because you are planning to write a lot of all cap text, and so, taking a second to turn it on via the touch bar seems okay. It is prime to be relegated to the touch-bar, while plenty of professionals use ESC all the time while touch-typing.
While they were at it, the switch window `command+~` short cut is almost unreachable on non-us like keyboard layouts.
If they were gonna break professional users keyboard workflow, why not fix some of the more glaring mistakes in current keyboard layout while they were at it?
They did. Under System Preferences > Keyboard > Modifier Keys… you can now map Caps Lock to Escape which you couldn’t before. It’s just not activated by default.
> the switch window `command+~` short cut is almost unreachable
Change it under System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Keyboard: Move focus to next window
Particularly with the caps-lock key I don't see why it takes up so much real estate.
> Change it under System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Keyboard: Move focus to next window
It is not like Apple doesn't know my locale. Why isn't it set up for easy use on it?
On the other hand, I do wonder what went into designing local keyboard variants. Many are quite hostile towards common programming characters, to the point where I actually use a US keyboard, despite it missing 3 letters from my native language's alphabet!
History, removing it outright would likely have caused more consternation than the escape key change.
Blame this one on defaults all you want, but keyboards actually have defined layouts for keys, the touchbar is probably the best way of easing into changing that. But you can't boil the ocean and all that.
> On the other hand, I do wonder what went into designing local keyboard variants. Many are quite hostile towards common programming characters, to the point where I actually use a US keyboard, despite it missing 3 letters from my native language's alphabet!
Also history, in the English case, the keyboard variants were designed will before computers and programming languages. Starting in 1870 for most typewriters in English, and moving from there. I highly doubt any design went into any local variants and computer programming simplicity.
So true. That's why companies make so many user-hostile settings as opt-out.
You've been able to do that for at least a couple of years now.
Project URL: https://github.com/susam/uncap#uncap
A number of my favourite keyboard layouts are at http://keyboards.jargon-file.org/ (notably Pseudo-VT320, which turns AltGr into a Linux-like compose key).
It looks a bit old, but works fine under Windows 8 and 10.
[0] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/globalization/keyboardlayou...
If you dislike editing Windows registry like me, you need a separate program to be running.
Unfortunately, both of these changes were not particularly popular. I think people only disliked the Home/End keys in place of Caps Lock because it was weird and different—I saw a lot of whining online, but nobody ever complained about not being able to use Caps Lock any more!
To some extent, I see where people are coming from: I regularly use at least two different external keyboards as well as my laptop keyboard, so it's hard to get used to a weird layout in just one place out of three. I'm an early adopter at heart and willing to power through the inconvenience for what I see as a better design but I also understand that it's too much bother for other people. (And, honestly, the upside isn't that big!)
On later generations, ThinkPad switched back to a more standard layout. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple wanted to avoid a similar reaction in changing the keyboard layout too much, especially since their touchbar was already a big enough change to stir up controversy.
I get your point about switching keyboards can get confusing, as well as it looks kinda weird at first, which is definitely enough to make people complain.
Good points.
The soft keys forced the home/end keys out, as well as the Escape key and the Delete key. Home/end landed on CapsLock, which was then relegated to a double-tap of the shift key. The double-tab feature was so sensitive that it could be activated just by typing normally, which suddenly would activate capslock.
To add to the confusion, the Escape key landed on the ~ key's location, which then had to be relocated to the right-hand windows key placement.
The delete key was jammed in by cutting the Backspace key in half and putting it there.
It took weeks of pure frustration and anger for me to even begin getting used to all this. The experience permanently turned me against soft touch bars on the function key row.
One of the world's fastest typists uses this technique: http://seanwrona.com/typing.php
Then you have a very limited imagination. There are lots of reasons that people need and use caps lock.
Off the top of my head-- Broadcast jorunalism. Every news story you hear on TV or radio is written in all caps. The same is true of the speeches by most professional public speakers.
If not, moving capslock to the touch bar is not a real problem.
Was one of a few serious ux problems that made me leave Apple only three years after initially being very exited about it.
So that still leaves me with the question of why the key exists?
What use cases would you have for voluntarily sending the host your "identification"? Was this used for authentication?
This started with 'write' etc. but became an escalating arms-race.
http://invisible-island.net/xterm/manpage/xterm.html#VT100-W....
But IIRC, we had some (non-DEC?) terminals that 'helpfully' allowed remote programming of the answerback as well. I recall there was also a race to find other ways to get terminals to reflect content (send line, forms etc.).
I remember a spate of answerback hacks with vt100s. the remote host could program the message by sending an escape sequence, and then get the vt100 to type the string back. you could make the tty execute commands that would give the attacker privs, and stuff like that. The main fix was hardening mail clients to filter escape sequences; simpler days to be sure, but the basic flaw (non-filtered text) still occurs in html forms
For instance, note the co-location of * and : characters on the same key. It's not in the same place on the Japanese layout, but the co-location is the same.
Another shared feature between the two is the co-location of the = and - (equals and dash).
Next, the tilde in the general same area on the Japanese layout as on this terminal, close to the Return key.
Lastly, the correlation between the numeric row keys and their Shift glyphs is almost the same on the Japanse layout and this terminal!
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
JPN-PC: ! " # $ % & ' ( ) <blank> __ same!
ADM-DA: ! " # $ % & ' ( ) <blank>
US-101: ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( )
0x2n: <blank> ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . /
0x3n: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < = > ?
Important to remember that ASR-33s weren't designed to be use with computers.