Re: across terminals

[Paul Eggert]

> From: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 14:20:46 +0300 (IDT)
> 
> > I have never seen a terminal that did not have these characters:
> >   # $ @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~
> > If they do exist, they must be rare
> 
> Unfortunately, this isn't true: many national keyboards in Europe don't 
> have keys for some of those ( {, |, and } seem to be most prone to 
> this).  You need to press some AltGr-key combination to get them.

Yes.  For example, according to
<http://www.246.ne.jp/~joe/info/latin1.htm>, the only printable
characters common to all the Western European IBM 106 keyboards are
the ASCII letters, digits, and the following:

  ! " % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; _

The following printable ASCII characters are absent from at least one
keyboard in that list:

  # $ <= > ? @ [ \ ] ^ ` { | } ~

> IIRC, \ and _ have some issues on Japanese keyboards.

We do have a few Japanese keyboards here, and characters like \ are
not a real problem with them.  Japanese users are well aware that the
Yen-sign character is actually an alias for \, so they know that if
the documentation says "Please type C-\" that they should actually
type Control-(yen-sign).  Some Japanese keyboards have both a yen-sign
and a backslash on the key, to indicate the alias.

> I remember that someone told me SIGQUIT was a pain in some European 
> country (Germany?) because you need a combination of keys to produce \.

Yes, and it works the other way sometimes too.  For example, it's a
pain to type a NUL on Unix US English Sun type 5 keyboard
(Control-Shift-2), but it's easier on a Japanese Information Standard
English IBM 106 keyboard (Control-@).