Re: 5250 Delete key

On Jul 28, 2019, at 1:20 PM, John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Right. We were thinking that the emulator could map the physical
Delete key to one of the AID-generating keys instead.

I do have a certain admiration for Booth's efforts to wring every last
bit of functionality out of the 5250 that he can, and I am reluctant
to tell him "if you want to do that, you really ought to be using
something other than 5250 already". But if the answer is "remap the
keys" then I'd want to take a step back and at least get the answer
to: Who is this *for*?

If it's for the author's own use, then I'd say fine. I think it would
be kind of annoying to have to switch key mappings if there are times
that the Del key should behave normally. But hey, whatever floats his
boat. (For myself, I would be inclined to go the AutoHotkey route if
this special Del behavior is not meant to be active all the time, in
all the 5250 applications. AutoHotkey can provide a certain measure of
context sensitivity.)

If it's for other people, then there's the question of deployment. Do
we have any guarantees about which emulator the user is using? Is it
reasonable or practical to disseminate this new mapping to them?

And maybe even a further step back to ask: *What* is this for? Like
you, I have a hard time imagining the use case for this. I would not
be surprised if the best answer of all is "revisit the design of the
application". Maybe there is something that is both more intuitive for
the user AND more straightforward to implement.

John Y.
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