Better keyboard shortcuts

Dale Amon amon at vnl.com
Sun Jun 26 22:50:02 UTC 2016


>> I believe it is called the Super key? What a stupid name to begin
>> with! And Alt is called the Meta key? Equally stupid!!!!.
>> [...]
>> What on earth were people thinking when they tried to get away from
>> calling it "windows key" and "alt key"????

> While nowadays there are only two naming schemes that are still
> commonly used (IBM PC-based & Apple), a long time ago many computer
> companies had their own keyboard layouts & key names.  On many old
> keyboards these keys were named the "meta" and "super" keys:
> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/Space-cadet.jpg/800px-Space-cadet.jpg

{META_KEY} was, and probably still is, a term used in a number of 
important Unix
based utilities like Emacs and EmacsLisp. The specific binding of 
MetaKey depends on the
system, and documentation is meant to be agnostic, thus some have come 
to think that
a particular key on the recently/mostly standardized laptop keyboards 
and 'Microsoft
Compatible' keyboards is what MetaKey means. Nope. It just happens to be 
assigned to
that particular use on those particular keyboards/systems.

Dale Amon




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