🚀 go-pugleaf

In Digest 303, Anees Munshi of Toronto writes:

>	On my ST at home, I can remove the key-tops, so it should be easy to
>remove and exchange the keytops of the 'Y' and 'Z' keys.
>[...]
>	Reality is so much better!

Practicability would be better still, for the following reasons:-

a) If you've ever studied the ST keys when you take them off, you see that the
   keys on the different rows are not identical in shape. 'Y' and 'Z' are on
   different rows. Ergo, swapping Y and Z is not practicable since it gives a
   keyboard with non-uniform key height or tilt. Having said all that, though,
   I guess that, if Y and Z were the only keys which needed to be changed,
   I could probably live with it, but...

b) The non-alphabetic keys have 2 symbols on each key (some on the German
   keyboard even have 3 - sometimes you have to press 'Shift' to get the other
   symbol and at other times you have to press 'Alternate', it's horrible -
   I mention this mainly for the benefit of people on the other side of the
   Big Pond where such trivia are apparently not so rife). A simple interchange
   of these keys is clearly out of the question.

Clearly, this particular issue comes under the heading of 'minor irritation'
rather than 'major problem' and doesn't warrant a lot of network bandwidth
to resolve, though I still don't have any nice VT220 style key caps on my ST
at home! As a concluding remark, let me just say that Atari put enough effort
into the design of the ST to make it possible to decouple the codes generated
by the keyboard from the codes received by user-written software. They didn't,
however, take the next logical step of realising that there might, therefore,
be a market for alternative key caps (or perhaps they did and decided it was
negligible).

<maden@rzsin.sin.ch>                    David Maden,
maden@czheth5a.bitnet                   Swiss Institute for Nuclear Research,
                                        CH-5234 Villigen