Re: PROPOSAL: Repurpose one key and reserve it for third-party packages

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Tue, 09 Feb 2021, Gregory Heytings wrote:

>>> How about C-\ or C-^? Historically these were used as substitutes
>>> for C-s and C-q when editing via serial lines (and there's still a
>>> function enable-flow-control that activates it). Certainly that's
>>> no longer a frequent use case?
>> 
>> C-\ is used to set the input method.  But we could move that
>> functionality to C-^, and then give up C-\ to third party packages.

> Except that \ is hard to type on most keyboards: C and \ are the two
> most distant keys on the most widespread keyboard layout (QWERTY), and
> on other keyboards \ requires pressing Shift or AltGr.  Not exactly an
> appealing prefix.

The same could be said for C-o or M-o. And if you care about non-QWERTY
layouts, C-z on a German QWERTZ keyboard isn't much better.

(Also I wonder, aren't Shift, Ctrl, and Alt keys meant to be used
crosswise, i.e., left key for the right half of the keyboard, and vice
versa? For example, how do you type C-b or C-t?)