[cduzz]

Oh, I understand why those old-time sysvr3.2 and sysvr4 systems would default to # backspace / @ kill -- even in the early 90s most places that ran unix had a weird zoo of different keyboards that would randomly put the backspace (or delete, or both!) keys in weird an inspired places, but the @ and # are usually in the same place everywhere. There were also some really old terminals that were basically just "screen is printer without paper" without even vt100 emulation mode (maybe they had fancy termcaps that'd let you run vi, but we only ever just used them on servers that weren't actually used too often, in the server room).

To this day, I use a 1990s vintage PS/2 keyboard, with a chain of adapters, on my mac (an old IBM M4-1 keyboard/trackpoint thing). At least on the mac it works perfectly because you can remap the caps lock key to command; it works pretty poorly on windows but such is life. Also, I very often, even today, use the # key as something akin to "kill" but instead in modern bash in vi mode if you're in escape mode it comments out the whole line.

But woof, watching people who'd never interacted with real (and old) sysv derived unixes instantly going insane trying to type things with @ or # and not understanding what's going on... kids that's what everyone had to fight with in the bad old days...

EDIT: and -- in old times, "backspace" and "delete" were actually different keys; bash and other modern shells hide this from you, (just as newline and carriage return were different actions) -- I guess learning how to type on a mechanical typewriter where you make the ! glyph with a ' and a backspace and a ., and where 1 and l were the same glyph, hopelessly burned the physicality of character rendering into me...

[JdeBP]

Heh! GNU groff, in particular its grotty driver, still does that to this day. There is a lengthy list of things that in ASCII or Latin-1 modes it composes with a character, a BS, and then another character.

https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/blob/trunk/source/UnicodeKeybo...

[justsomehnguy]

> it works pretty poorly on windows but such is life

You can use SharpKeys to remap keys on Windows.