2 ms·

Seeing that you need to press enter, the arrow keys are not far away. I doubt the later one.

by gsich 9y ago

gumby 9y ago
You doubt that they keyboards lacked arrow keys? Just look at an ASR-33 (teletype) keyboard or ADM3A. The latter had arrows printed on the hjkl keys but there was no special way to generate “arrow” key presses — those terminals sent 7-bit ASCII characters directly. Look at what # and @ do in cooked mode — THAT goes back to Multics. The teletype was a printing terminal and the ADM3A was a “glass teletype” — essentially a printing terminal too. It’s possinle to write a lot of good code this way
- gsich 9y ago
  No. I doubt that many used them to program shells. Bash is from 1989 for example.
  - gumby 9y ago
    I'm not trying to argue; there are not "arrow" characters in the ASCII character set. sh, csh ksh and bash were all developed on ascii terminals. Brian had an Ann Arbor Ambassador which does do 8-bit ASCII but we always had them configured to set the top bit as a "meta" key, so essentially you had 7-bit ascii as well. All these terminals were connected by serial lines to computers (an unusued Vax 750 in the case of the GNU project; that was the machine he developed Bash on -- for the other shells, developed at Bell labs, ksh was also developed also ib a vax while sh and csh were developed on PDP-11s IMHO). You can see the key layouts available back in the days of ASCII terminals here: http://xahlee.info/kbd/vt100_terminal.html http://xahlee.info/kbd/vt100_terminal.html and of course use man ascii. FWIW anyway Brian wouldn't have thought about those keys as the intended use of Readline would have been emacs keystrokes (emacs, or EMACS as it was in those days, had recently been ported to Unix by RMS). Interestingly our 36-bit machines (PDP-10s and lispms) had arrow glyphs on their custom non-ASCII keyboards (KTV and space cadet) but they were for mathematical notation, not cursor movement!
gumby 9y ago
I’ll add that bash was the first Unix shell to have interactive editing with history, which comes from me suggesting the design of the readline library to Brian Fox around 1985. I was inspired by the editing JSYS (system calls) in TOPS-20 (VMS had something similar I believe) though they lacked the history mechanism.

Seeing that you need to press enter, the arrow keys are not far away. I doubt the later one.

by gsich 9y ago

Seeing that you need to press enter, the arrow keys are not far away. I doubt the later one.

You doubt that they keyboards lacked arrow keys? Just look at an ASR-33 (teletype) keyboard or ADM3A. The latter had arrows printed on the hjkl keys but there was no special way to generate “arrow” key presses — those terminals sent 7-bit ASCII characters directly. Look at what # and @ do in cooked mode — THAT goes back to Multics. The teletype was a printing terminal and the ADM3A was a “glass teletype” — essentially a printing terminal too. It’s possinle to write a lot of good code this way

gsich 9y ago
No. I doubt that many used them to program shells. Bash is from 1989 for example.
- gumby 9y ago
  I'm not trying to argue; there are not "arrow" characters in the ASCII character set. sh, csh ksh and bash were all developed on ascii terminals. Brian had an Ann Arbor Ambassador which does do 8-bit ASCII but we always had them configured to set the top bit as a "meta" key, so essentially you had 7-bit ascii as well. All these terminals were connected by serial lines to computers (an unusued Vax 750 in the case of the GNU project; that was the machine he developed Bash on -- for the other shells, developed at Bell labs, ksh was also developed also ib a vax while sh and csh were developed on PDP-11s IMHO). You can see the key layouts available back in the days of ASCII terminals here: http://xahlee.info/kbd/vt100_terminal.html http://xahlee.info/kbd/vt100_terminal.html and of course use man ascii. FWIW anyway Brian wouldn't have thought about those keys as the intended use of Readline would have been emacs keystrokes (emacs, or EMACS as it was in those days, had recently been ported to Unix by RMS). Interestingly our 36-bit machines (PDP-10s and lispms) had arrow glyphs on their custom non-ASCII keyboards (KTV and space cadet) but they were for mathematical notation, not cursor movement!

gumby 9y ago

I’ll add that bash was the first Unix shell to have interactive editing with history, which comes from me suggesting the design of the readline library to Brian Fox around 1985. I was inspired by the editing JSYS (system calls) in TOPS-20 (VMS had something similar I believe) though they lacked the history mechanism.