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What's the point?
Authored by: babbage on Feb 22, '02 10:22:01PM
As MacQueen noted, this is an older & still popular configuration for Unix keyboards. I'm not quite that old school -- I grew up with PCs & Macs and don't remember a time when the current configuration wasn't the norm -- but you still see keyboards like that today, particularly with Sun hardware. Maybe others too, but Sun boxes are the only 'true' Unix machines I've worked on at the console (as opposed to telnetting remotely through a PC of some kind).

Personally, I like having all the modifier keys in a row together on the bottom of the keyboard, and don't have a problem reaching down with my pinky for all the ^foo chords that you have to use in Emacs, Vi, Pine, the shells, etc. But, like many things, it's a religious issue for many people, and in the end the right thing is to just allow the user to override anything that might reasonably need to be overridden.

I've never messed around with it, but what does the Keyboards widget in System Preferences let you override? You can set international keymappings, can't you? If so, can't the 'standard Unix set' [provided that such a thing could be agreed upong ;] be added as an option there? Seems like a more robust solution than trial & error of unpublished settings in whatever ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.*.plist file would apply here...

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