Stan writes:

> > [The control keys that have come to new PC programs have become]
> > the Macintosh's "command key" functions (for which there is no
> > equivalent key on a PC's keyboard) have come to the PC and have
> > very quickly become the new standard.
>
>  How about the ALT key?  That's precisely what it's for!

A surprising number of people have written me privately and suggested the same
thing. Unfortunately, it's not true -- and you can demonstrate to yourself
that it's not in just an instant.

The ALT key is by Windows default associated with the pull-down menuing
structure. More importantly yet, it takes on its various definitions in a
hierarchical fashion. ALT+T may mean one thing at the base menu level,
something completely different once you're in the ALT+T-invoked menu, and then
something different yet again in the next layer's submenu.

The CNTL key is handled significantly differently by Windows. It is not
hierarchically menu dependent. It means the same thing everywhere within the
window where it has been defined. In that regard, it's much more similar to
the Mac's command key than it is to the PC's ALT key -- and I'm sure that that
is the reason why everyone from Bill Gates on down has adopted the CNTL key as
the new modifier of choice.

However, the collective comments have convinced me to allow a mode where the
alphabetic keys, when modified with a CNTL key, can be either be (by user
setting) transmitted on to the host or (by default) take on the new standard
definitions that occur in Excel, Word, Netscape, IE, and a thousand other
programs nowadays.

Again, I believe that it is important to design the product for the people who
are most likely to be using it. In this case, our target audience is the
business user. Nonetheless, since yesterday's posting, I asked five more
people, all of whom populate this list and thus can't truly be considered to
be our primary target, how many of their applications programs that they run
utilize control-code keys to activate any portion of their applications'
behavior. The answer was -- as well as anybody could come up with on the spur
of the moment -- is the same answer that we got in our first survey: none.

It's the old-style, host-based editors that tend to use control-codes as
behavior controllers. If you're not a developer or a code-stitcher, you're
very unlikely to ever see a control-code requirement. Nevertheless, a simple
configuration switch would seem to solve everybody's concerns, and it will be
in the next release of QCTerm.

Unfortunately, the ALT key is not the answer, in part because of the way that
Windows handles it, but especially so now that all other programs have chosen
the CNTL key.

Wirt Atmar