RE: Suggestion: minor change to TUTORIAL(.*)

[Drew Adams]

    > There are no key names that contain spaces.

    My keyboard has keys labeled like this:

       Page     Num
         Down     Lock

    etc.  It's hard to say about these that they don't contain spaces.

I'm talking about the key names that are used by Emacs - logical key names,
not physical keyboard key names.

See my previous email on that (subject line "bug in read-kbd-macro"), which
you declined to read because of its length. Your physical key "Page Down" is
referred to by Emacs (in both the manual and the UI messages and *Help*) by
the logical-key name `<next>', which has no spaces.

There are no logical-key names that contain spaces, at least none that I am
aware of. We do not use `<mode line>', for instance; we use `<mode-line>'.
(This is a precondition for my argument to dispense with using angle
brackets.)

[I don't know where our key names come from. Perhaps they are derived from
the X-Window names in file keysymdef.h? None of the keysymdef.h key names
have embedded spaces, either, including the keys XK_Next and XK_Page_Down.]

    > Is the following hard to understand?
    >
    >   `M-x  t e x t  SPC  m o d e  RET'

    It's very hard to read, especially with longer commands.

There are relatively few instructions to type keys in the manuals, and the
above, fictitious example (not from a manual) is much longer than any I have
seen in the manual - about twice as long. So the length problem you cite
does not seem to be a problem in practice.

The problem of ambiguity between, say, "Type `M-x'" (3 keystrokes) and "Type
`M-x'" (1 chord keystroke), is, however, real - the former should be written
"Type `M - x'".