zippolupan wrote: 02 Apr 2020, 18:37
As I anxiously await the arrival of my Soarer's converter, I wonder what many of the unusual keys in the F122's weird layout used to do back in the day. Is there some sort of user manual available somewhere?
Yes, there
are. Remember the terminal keyboards were heavily tied to specific applications within specific systems (and that is why there are many versions of the EF block, the mods on the numpad, etc.).
SOME of the legends are rather obvious without context (on the F122 under my fingers right now: "SetUp", "Play", "Print", "Help", etc.)... while some need to be cleared up: "ErInp" stands for "Erase Input", which was more or less what ^U does on Unix systems; "ExSel" stands for "Execute Selected", which was the execute command for some menu-based command systems; the "Hex" legend, as I managed to find out when I got my filthy hands on a manual, corresponds to the method of inputting characters by their (hexadecimal) EBCDIC code.
Did I say manual? Yup, I got one... but I haven't had the time to actually scan it and upload it to DT's wiki.
zippolupan wrote: 02 Apr 2020, 18:37
Also, for those who use their 122-key boards as a daily driver, how do you personally map those keys?
Looking for some interesting ideas here!
Oh, I
have quite some ideas.
For starters, F13..F24
are recognized by Windows, and by some applications as well. My favorite text editor recognizes them, so I've populated them with all kinds of common phrases that I enter all the time while writing source code.
On the EF block, I map EF1 to be the Windows key (nice and easy, and out of the way), EF2 is Esc, EF3 is Pause, EF4 is Shift-Tab (as it is right to the left of Tab); EF5 happens to have the Print legend, so guess what is present in there; F6 is a secondary AltGr (although I barely use this, mostly from lack of selftraining); F7, F8 and F9 are my volume controls, but I'll be getting rid of those soon (as I've come to prefer the Caps Lock overloading method much better); F10 is LAlt-RCtrl (this comes from the M122, where some combinations of keys don't work, like LAlt-LCtrl).