[xubuntu-users] alt-delete, hmmm, interesting

[Peter Flynn]

On 10/01/2013 07:04 PM, Wes James wrote:
> I was trying to learn some commands in emacs and a cheat sheet I have
> said to use M-delete to delete a word.  I tried that and nothing was
> happening. After a few tries I noticed that a number of work spaces I
> had were gone. I then tried M-backspace and that is what I really
> wanted. M in my case was the Alt key so Alt-delete means delete a
> work space ;)

Emacs unfortunately suffers from having inherited some antique settings
from early Unix keyboards, where DEL and BSP were either conflated or
one of them was actually missing.

The Meta key is usually Esc, so M-delete means press Esc and then press
DEL (one after the other, not together).

Alt can have radically different effects depending on your keyboard
mapping. I hardly ever use Alt in Emacs (the exception being C-v to page
down and Alt-v to page up), because it's used for so much other system
control.

My .emacs always starts with

        (global-unset-key [backspace] )
        (global-set-key [backspace] 'delete-backward-char)
        (global-unset-key [delete] )
        (global-set-key [delete] 'delete-char)

to make certain that BSP and DEL *on their own* do what they are
expected to do (nowadays; many older Unix hackers prefer DEL to perform
a destructive backspace).

I can confirm (on this Dell Latitude D610 laptop running Xubuntu 13.04)
that Alt-DEL really does delete a workspace, starting from the RH end.
This is truly unwanted behaviour, so I suggest you remap it in your
.emacs file to something less destructive.

Word deletion in Emacs is usually done with C-DEL to delete the word
after point (delete forwards; M-d, Esc d, and Alt-d also seems to work);
and C-BSP to delete the word before point (delete backwards).

The user expectations for keyboard characters are very mixed. In the
recent tests I did for my research the tasks involving
character-deletion (4 & 5) showed that users were much more certain that
DEL would delete to the right than they were that BSP would delete to
the left (this isn't covered in the summary at
http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol10/html/Flynn02/BalisageVol10-Flynn02.html
but the full thesis will have the details if anyone's interested).

///Peter