Sunday, December 18, 2011

Re: h j k l -- keys

On 12/16/2011 09:35 PM, Marty Fried wrote:

> I have a slightly different theory... Ctrl-H is the ASCII backspace
> character, so it was chosen for back. Ctrl-J is the linefeed character,
> so it was chosen for down. Both of those match each other. The other
> two just happen to be nearby, so they were enlisted to fill in.

But this raises the question:
*why* did ASCII assign those particular meanings to those characters
in the first place?

Perhaps that convention arose for the same reason as hjkl for cursor
movement? I.e., no arrow keys on the original keyboards (which in
ASCII's case probably means teletypes rather than computers.)

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