On Sat, 2006-06-03 at 08:11, Craig White wrote: > ---- > I remember this on a Macintosh pre-dating Windows and any Microsoft > acceptance of this. > > It was the 'Apple' modifier and the bottom row, left to right... > Z = Undo > X = Cut > C = Copy > V = Paste > > 'twas always thus but Apple had some power to make it stick because of > the single menu design and the Apple Uniform Interface Guidelines > published very early on. Microsoft saw the wisdom of this and has > implemented it across their applications. GUI applications tend to > leverage this to provide for user familiarity. > > Obviously an application such as emacs which has roots which never > anticipated a GUI interface doesn't conform to this familiarity. Don't forget that apple also had the power to supply a keyboard with the same key set with its machines. Back in the day when our most useful programs were written (pre-dating the IBM PC by many years), terminals were connected by serial lines, had no alt key, few or no function keys, and had no standard for what the arrow keys sent if they had any. That's why the control keys are so overloaded and why vi has modes to use normal keys for commands. There are many side effects to this ancient history, including the fact that you can have canned complex vi edit command sequences stored in a text file so you can simply paste them into an open edit window using the standard paste mechanism where doing the same with GUI editor usually means learning yet another different macro language and yet another way to save and invoke them. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
