GNU emacs key remapping

[Mike Yang]

In article <3517 at leah.Albany.Edu>, bk7295 at leah.Albany.Edu (Brian A.
Kell) writes:
|> I've been trying to remap things in GNU emacs to make my iris
keyboard
|> consistant with the vt100 terminals also used at my location.  It's
|> quite easy to redefine the backspace key to actually delete
characters:
|> 	(define-key global-map "\C-h" 'delete-backward-char)
|> but it's much more difficult to come up with an alternate help
character,
|> such as the delete key (^?).  This seems to be because ^h is defined
|> somewhere as a special 'prefix character', similarly to ^x, ^c,
esc-x,
|> etc.

I found that the method you describe for remapping the backspace key to
be "delete" has similar problems -- some modes (e.g. rmail) have
hardcoded
into them "\C-h" in some way.

So, to muck with the interals of gnuemacs and really swap backspace
and delete, I do:

	;; Set up keymap so that ^H and delete are swapped
	(progn
	  (setq keyboard-translate-table (make-string 128 0))
	  (let ((i 0))
	    (while (< i 128)
	      (aset keyboard-translate-table i i)
	      (setq i (1+ i)))))
	(aset keyboard-translate-table ?\^h ?\^?)
	(aset keyboard-translate-table ?\^? ?\^h)

This works well for gnuemacs run in xterm or wsh windows.

However, it doesn't work correctly for gnuemacs X windows (i.e.
gnuemacs without the -nw switch).  I suspect that this is because the
X server is doing something funny with the keyboard mappings, and
xterm is fixing it up.

It doesn't bother me because I always run gnuemacs within shells.  If
you don't, omit the last line from above and you'll still remap
backspace to be delete.  However, you won't have the help-command key
bound to anything.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
                 Mike Yang        Silicon Graphics, Inc.
               mikey at sgi.com           415/335-1786