Emacs Keybindings for early LISP keyboards and modern usage?

Nicholas Papadonis nick.papadonis.ml at gmail.com
Thu Oct 24 22:02:12 UTC 2019


Does anyone know the physical to functional keybindings for early LISP
Machine keyboards, Symbols, Knight, Space Cadet etc featured here:

http://xahlee.info/kbd/lisp_keyboards.html

I did an analysis against the Space Cadet against my iMac Bluetooth
keyboard.  Here are some rough samples because physical mapping is not 1-1:

iMac.                          Symbolics Space Cadet
Command Left/Right  Space or no key
Option Left.                Control
Control Left.               Control
Fn Left                       Meta
Option Right.                Control
Left Arrow Right.         Control
Up/Down Arrow           Right Meta
Caps Lock                     Alt Mode or Rub Out (Delete under char?)
Tab                                Network or Tab
To further summarize my inquiry, I'm wondering:

 o If there was any physical reason for the placement of the keys on the
early LISP keyboards?  Perhaps frequency of that particular input as a key
in editing LISP code?
 o Is there any key mapping of these LISP machine keyboards to Emacs
functions?  (Emacs had been around at that time)
 o Did the Emacs functional keybindings (M-x) for instance change over
time?  For instance did the early LISP keyboards Meta key + x, correspond
to M-x of was it different?
 o Has anyone created a similar physical mapping of the iMac Bluetooth
keyboard with above in mind from a physical to Emacs functional
perspective?

I also noted that there are arrow keys above g,h,k,l.  For instance, were
these used to move the cursor?  If so, I would argue they are better
placement then modern arrow keys and/or Alt-n Alt-p, for cursor movement.   I'm
also suspicious that the Space Cadet ALT MODE which is close to the iMac
TAB may be the original mapping to Meta functionality because it
corresponds easily to the pinky figure.

Finally, does someone have one of these keyboards because I would love to
try one out. :)

Appreciate anyone's guidance on this.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.common-lisp.net/pipermail/boston-lisp/attachments/20191024/e6a15bfd/attachment.htm>


More information about the boston-lisp mailing list