On Fri, 2007-08-24 at 17:42 -0400, William Case wrote: > I suppose there is a simple answer; there should be. But I have been > having difficulty even explaining what I am asking. I usually get > answers of the kind "Of course it executes the command. You pushed > RET" What happens when you press a key depends on the listening program. Pressing "A" doesn't always type an A to the screen, likewise ENTER doesn't always do the same thing (accepts the entry of data, finishes a paragraph, inserts a blank line, etc.). The terminal is an interface between keyboard and a program. That program might be the BASH interpreter, it might be a text editor. Unless the interface snaffles up a keypress for itself (e.g. F11 for full screen, in Gnome Terminal), the keypress is passed onto the end program, for it do what it does with it, and perhaps returning some acknowledging display to the interface. That does demonstrate the problems of writing some programs - you may have to design them for the limits of environments they're likely to be used in (e.g. you couldn't expect always being able to notice the F11 key being pressed, in your program). I've omitted at least one preceding part of the equation. When you press a key on the keyboard, e.g. "S", you're pressing key three down, two across on a QWERTY keyboard. It doesn't mean "S" to anything, at this stage. There's a keymap that associates keys in certain positions with certain labels. That means that all programs can use "S" as "S," in documentation and programming, no matter what keyboard you have, else you'd have programs that used different hotkeys depending on your keyboard (e.g. the same key is an "O" on a Dvorak keyboard). I recall Doten wishing that he could make his work differently, the other way around, so that cut and paste, for instance, always used the same buttons on the keyboard, no matter what letters they could represent. -- [tim@bigblack ~]$ uname -ipr 2.6.22.1-41.fc7 i686 i386 Using FC 4, 5, 6 & 7, plus CentOS 5. Today, it's FC7. Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
