Re: [PATCH] Change <delete> to delete forward in the editor menu.

On 2026-07-26 12:03:55 -0300, Jim via Mutt-dev wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 26, 2026 at 17:13 (+0300), Valentin Nechayev wrote:
> > First, donʼt blame Microsoft; this was IBM who pushed its style of
> > keyboard after XT/AT and AT-101 ones to standard, including such
> > previously impossible thing as Selectric placement of non-alphanumeric
> > keys. Microsoft was not strong enough yet in mis-1980s to make this.
> 
> Fair comment.  But I will say that before I saw my first IBM PC (with MS
> software on it) I had never seen a keyboard with "backspace" up in that
> corner of the keyboard.  (Well, with the possible exception of an APL
> terminal; as you may know, in APL backspace didn't delete, because there
> were some characters composed as <char 1><backspace><char 2>.)

IMHO, you are not talking about the usual BackSpace key here, but
about the ASCII (and now Unicode) backspace character, with code 8.

U+0008 BACKSPACE

not to be confused with

U+007F DELETE

At some point (possibly introduced by Microsoft), the BackSpace key
was sending the character of code 8 and the Delete key was sending
the character of code 127 (0x7f), and on such a system, the character
of code 8 was deleting backward and the the character of code 127
was deleting forward. But later, this was assumed to be incorrect,
and nowadays, with most system configurations, the BackSpace key
sends the character of code 0x7f (which was originally the character
to delete backward) and the Delete key sends some special escape
sequence.

Apple keyboards only have a Delete key, whose effect is to delete
backward (like the BackSpace key on other keyboards):

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_keyboards

The naming is more consistent, but the absence of a key to delete
forward is less practical.

With Xorg, the BackSpace key still sends the character of code 8
and the Delete key sends the the character of code 0x7f, as given
by XLookupString (seen with xev, for instance). However, I suspect
that XLookupString is mostly ignored by the applications, in favor
of the keysym.

> On this particular laptop, there is a left-pointing arrow on the key which
> I use to delete backwards (so it isn't called anything, in the sense of
> having a word or abbreviation of a word on it).

It is typically called the backspace key:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace#Nomenclature

> Above that there is a much smaller key labelled "delete".

And this is the delete key.

BTW, I've found in my archives:

  https://aterm.sourceforge.net/keyboard.html
  "Consistent BackSpace and Delete Configuration"

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <[email protected]> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
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