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Comment by ianbicking | Hacker News Reader

The AGAIN and SAME keys are interesting.

I can imagine what AGAIN would do. Like if you pasted an image, AGAIN would paste the same image. But I imagine it applying to a deeply nested menu item or other control which might be hard to access over and over. At least that's what I imagine, it would be great to know how it was really intended to be used.

SAME is provocative, but I can't quite figure out what it would do. Given a single selected object it might select all similar objects? Or given a text selection, show other instances of that text?

On the right side, what does the KEYBOARD key do? I'm really at a loss on that one.

On the enter key there's two symbols. Is that maybe to indicate that enter does CR/LF (next line, back to beginning), but with shift it just does CR (back to beginning of line)?

There's COPY and MOVE, but no PASTE. I'm not sure if you do COPY+MOVE to do the modern cut/paste, or...?

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SAME is a copy style/properties operation; it modifies the selection to have the properties of the target.

AGAIN repeats the previous operation on the current (presumably new) selection.

KEYBOARD brought up an on-screen keyboard for special characters.

MOVE moved the current selection to the target location, and COPY duplicated the current selection at the target location. There was no invisible clipboard. [also previously edited into my comment below]

See The star user interface: an overview which is now happily free: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1500774.1500840

For those who don't know, Office has "Format Painter" which does this - select the text you want it to look like, select it, and then select the text to change.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/use-the-format-pa...

Apple Pages, too.

That was actually my only guess at what the KEYBOARD key did, but a virtual keyboard seemed so modern (and mobile phone inspired) that I dismissed the idea

Some of the popular engineering/technical Unix workstations around then or shortly after also had special keys that we might still find useful today, but that didn't make it to the PC or Mac at the time.

For example, the late 1980s Sun Type-4 keyboard:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jgrove/3051883468/

A 1984 Apollo workstation:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mwichary/2288724329/

My later HP workstation had a cute "delete line" key. (Which I was very happy to bind as a new Emacs user, though I soon found that Emacs could have smarter commands that meant I didn't need "delete line" much at all.)

As much as there was a time that I loved the idea of the Sun special keys, today I work exclusively from laptop-like TrackPoint keyboards, and I'd actually like to remove some special keys: the Win95 keys between Ctrl and Alt, which I've found window management uses for, but make it harder to hit the right Ctrl or Alt modifier than it used to be. And I'd get rid of the ThinkPad Fn key on that era of keyboard I still use.

The SAME key would make text "look the same".

Found at: https://issuu.com/65c02/docs/50890515

"You can select the object(s) to be changed, pus the SAME key, then designate the objects to use as the source. COPY PROPERTIES makes the selection look the "same" as the source. this is particularly useful in graphics editing. Frequently you will have a collection of lines and symbols whose appearance you want to be coordinated (all the same line width, share of grey, etc.). You can select all the objects to be changes, push SAME, and select a line or symbol having the desired appearance."

And AGAIN does what you would mostly expect:

"AGAIN repeats the last command(s) on a new selection. All the commands done since the last time a selection was made are repeated. this is useful when a short sequence of commands needs to be done on several different selections; for example, make several scattered words bold and italic in a larger font."

"MOVE" is "cut" in modern lingo; I think that COPY/MOVE works in a way with "selections" in such a way that you don't need a "PASTE", but I can't really make it out from just that document (which I didn't read in full, I should add).

No mention of the KEYBOARD key; can't think of anything that's supposed to do either.

It's interesting that AGAIN uses selections as checkpoints of a sort. I think that was probably the wrong idea as selections need to be made and remade to get them right, and so they aren't clear checkpoints, but interesting nevertheless. Though ignoring selections that you didn't act on might be sufficient to filter out those mistakes.

The selection/target distinction is also another interesting path not taken. I encountered it in Oberon as well. I remember it feeling quite powerful, and yet I also was easily confused, like it was just a little too much to keep track of.

Interestingly, the AGAIN command is still very much supported in Google Docs/Sheets/Slides (and, I believe, in MS Office as well).

If you "redo" (ctrl-shift-z, or use the toolbar, or whatever) without having just "undone", the app performs the same action you just did on the new selection.

My daily driver keyboard is a Sun Type 7 USB, mostly because I find these keys amusing. A fair number can be made to work with a little effort. It was very useful when I sprained my left pinky finger, making ctrl-c and others difficult.

For example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/144594997129?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid...

AGAIN is like “.” in Vim.

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