Thus it was written in the epistle of WirtAtmar (in less scrambled order),
>
> 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.

Unfortunately, I've got to agree there--what folks like Bill Gates haven't
faced, though, is that the Mac has a Control key *and* a Command key (if I
remember correctly) and that mapping the purposes of two keys onto one is bound
to cause trouble.  Sigh.  Oh, well.  The "least surprise" argument is a good
one and if a config switch will allow that both for the developers and for the
users, I think you'll be able to have the best of both worlds.

> 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.

That's part of what the whole excitement is about.  We keep thinking about it
from the point of view of 3000 natives who spend our time doing 3000 stuff,
not Excel and Word and so forth.

>                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.

As I said in private email, they missed Control-Y (Also, Quick users should
have reported in on Control-G, as should those of us who use Control-G for
waking up users on the other end of :WARN commands).  Oh, and did I mention
that every application responds to Control-S/Control-Q :-).

> 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.

The configuration switch coupled with allowing the "old-windows" cut-and-paste
keystrokes to duplicate the functionality as almost every Windows program out
there does (after all, some of your "business users" may have learned those
keystrokes instead of the Control-C/Control-V family) would be wonderful.

Ted
--
Ted Ashton ([log in to unmask]), Info Serv, Southern Adventist University
          ==========================================================
The so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not
only advanced this subject, but saturated with it, they fancied that the
principles of mathematics were the principles of all things.
                                       -- Aristotle (ca 330 BC)