From: utzoo!decvax!cca!Brian@sri-unix
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Title: Re: EMACS control character warning
Article-I.D.: sri-unix.1909
Posted: Sat Jun 26 19:59:35 1982
Received: Tue Jun 29 01:41:22 1982

Date: 11 June 1982 08:19-EDT
For what it's worth, my Unix is running an EMACS-like editor (but not
true, extensible, etc) which avoids ^S and ^Q.  The really painful part
is that all the plausible keys to use instead already had other meanings,
so we mapped ^S to ^\ and ^Q to ^^ (which is ^` or ^~ if you're using
a VT-100).  Our users live through it.  (There is a version of this
editor, edt, on the forthcoming Usenix distribution, although since we
sent it in, the author has added 2-window mode and multiple buffers and
stuff like that -- advt.)  (The author, by the way, is Jonathan Payne,
a high school senior.  Very impressive work.)

If you have a VT-100 style (a/k/a ANSI) terminal, you don't have to
avoid ESC to get arrow keys, all you have to do is avoid ESC [ as a
command sequence.  edt uses the usual EMACS ESC commands and also
understands VT-100 arrow keys.

I mention the particular mapping we use because it would be nice to have
a universal standard and it would, I agree, be nice if the standard
avoided ^S/^Q.  It is truly wonderful to me that I can go from MIT with
the real EMACS to my high school with edt and even to somebody's Z80
running MINCE and still be able to edit text.  (Although it would sure
be nice if MINCE did the right thing with numeric arguments to ^K.)

edt, by the way, uses termcap and all that good stuff.