Ask HN: Why don't computer keyboards have a 'forwardspace' and a backspace char | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why don't computer keyboards have a 'forwardspace' and a backspace char

1 pointadrian_mrd11 comments

I understand the history of the backspace and delete keys, but it strikes me as odd and inefficient that keyboards (especially software based ones) do not have a dedicated key that can remove to the right of the cursor as well: a 'forwardspace' key if you will. Has any major OS vendor / hardware keyboard manufacturer attempted this? Was it part of keyboards before the QWERTY adoption? (note: the insert/overwrite would be similar but not functionally the same as this proposal because a forwardspace and backspace would be 'equals', at lesst in terms of names and prominence on a keyboard.

And how do backspace characters work in right-to-left languages like Arabic, Japanese, etc.

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My take: That's what the spacebar is. Originally the backspace key did the inverse. This probably worked a lot more like what we think of as "overwrite" mode on early terminals.

The "delete" character is something else entirely. It seems to have been invented to wipe (literally "delete") a position on a paper tape, for example. That's the reason its character code is all ones (in the seven bit code of the time). The ones were holes, and you could "delete" any other character (a mix of holes and not-holes) by punching a hole in every position.

A lot of the rest is just historical accident.

Because keyboards have the most design inertia of all computer hardware products. The one thing that keyboard makers are loathe to experiment with is the keys. That's why keyboards in 2018 still have a gigantic CAPSLOCK key when it is almost never used. Also why in the age of prosumer hardware you don't see keyboards for programmers with dedicated programming IDE keys, such as a single key to compile. No matter how innovative (or retro) manufacturers in keyboard manufacture nobody wants to experiment with the actual key options that people press.

Theory has it that real typists actually _do_ use the CAPSLOCK key. They seem to be rather rare, though.

Meh; I do freelance copy-editing and transcription, and I never use it.

Actually the Touchbar on Apple MacBook Pro laptops provides the equivalent of a Compile key.

The delete the character "before" the cursor; I'm not sure I understand the question. RTL languages still have forward and back, they're just RTL: it's still a backspace.

Re the larger question: historical. Never seen anybody with anything like it.

I'm not sure I'd use it very much; usually my mistakes are things I've just typed.

When they're not, I have to put my cursor near the error anyway, and if I'm doing that, I either put it in the right spot to backspace, or I'm performing larger-than-single-character-scale edits anyway).

The lack of dedicated key is probably an artifact of the typewriter origins of the keyboard, where the paper moves under the cursor as you type, and it’s somewhere between difficult and nonsensical to move forwards rather than backwards through existing text.

FWIW, Fn-delete works as forward-delete on Mac.

> but it strikes me as odd and inefficient that keyboards (especially software based ones) do not have a dedicated key that can remove to the right of the cursor as well:

Isn't this the delete key?

Yes, but not all keyboards have it (e.g., Apple) and you have to combo to get DEL.

So is this a question on why don't Apple keyboards have a DEL key?

They do--they don't have a backspace key. But they mean backspace.

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