OT What does RET (Enter) do and how does it do it ??

[Aaron Konstam]

On Sun, 2007-08-26 at 10:03 -0700, Les wrote:
> On Sat, 2007-08-25 at 14:15 -0400, Matthew Flaschen wrote:
> > William Case wrote:
> > > What I would now like ask is, is someone saving, arranging, compiling,
> > > harvesting these middle level answers so they can easily be found by the
> > > newrus and gurbies of the world?  I know how long I have spent searching
> > > for answers or explanations.
> > 
> > You should consider starting a blog or making an FAQ about these questions.
> 
> Maybe this would be a good Wiki.  I mean from what I gather a wiki is
> about gatherW
> Regards,
> Les H
> 
Well that is an idea. Just getting across that each key generates a
keycode and what the programs do with the keycodes is up to the
programs.

A second basic fact that needs to be undertood, which  OP I think did
not, is that what comes out of the keyboard or any other input device is
just a stream of characters read from the appropriate buffer.
What a program like vi does with that stream may make it look like a
series of lines across the width of the window but that is an artifact
of what vi does with the character stream it receives.

A good illustration of this is a project my son took on the summer after
finishing high school. That was a Hebrew word processing program.
Lines were displayed from right to left and keys when typed showed up
with Hebrew letters. And of course things like the shift key caused a
shift of the cursor to the left , not to the right. What fun that
project was!
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Aaron Konstam telephone: (210) 656-0355 e-mail: akonstam at sbcglobal.net