11. Logical Key-Events
Some primitives such as prompt-for-key (page 50) and commands such as Emacs query replace read key-events directly from the keyboard instead of using the command interpreter. To encourage consistency between these commands and to make them portable and easy to customize, there is a mechanism for defininglogical key-events. A logical key-event is a keyword which stands for some set of key-events. The system globally interprets these key-events as indicators a particular action. For example, the :help logical key-event represents the set of key-events that request help in a given Hemlock implementation. This mapping is a many-to-many mapping, not one-to-one, so a given logical key-event may have multiple corresponding actual key-events. Also, any key-event may represent different logical key-events.
11.2. Logical Key-Event Functions
This variable holds a string-table mapping all logical key-event names to the keyword identifying the logical key-event.
define-logical-key-event string-name documentation [Function]
This function defines a new logical key-event with name string-name. Logical key-event operations take logical key-events arguments as a keyword whose name is string-name uppercased with spaces replaced by hyphens.
Documentation describes the action indicated by the logical key-event.
logical-key-event-key-events keyword [Function]
This function returns the list of key-events representing the logical key-event keyword.
logical-key-event-name keyword [Function]
logical-key-event-documentation keyword [Function]
These functions return the string name and documentation given to define-logical-key-event for logical key-event keyword.
logical-key-event-p key-event keyword [Function]
This function returns t if key-event is the logical key-event keyword. This is setf-able establishing or disestablishing key-events as particular logical key-events. It is a error for keyword to be an undefined logical key-event.
11.3. System Defined Logical Key-Events
There are many default logical key-events, some of which are used by functions documented in this manual. If a command wants to read a single key-event command that fits one of these descriptions then the key-event read should be compared to the corresponding logical key-event instead of explicitly mentioning the particular key-event in the code. In many cases you can use the command-case (page 48) macro. It makes logical key-events easy to use and takes care of prompting and displaying help messages.
- :abort Indicates the prompter should terminate its activity without performing any closing actions of convenience, for example.
- :yes Indicates the prompter should take the action under consideration.
- :no Indicates the prompter should NOT take the action under consideration.
- :do-all Indicates the prompter should repeat the action under consideration as many times as possible.
- :do-once Indicates the prompter should execute the action under consideration once and then exit.
- :help Indicates the prompter should display some help information.
- :confirm Indicates the prompter should take any input provided or use the default if the user entered nothing.
- :quote Indicates the prompter should take the following key-event as itself without any sort of command interpretation.
- :keep Indicates the prompter should preserve something.
- :y Indicates a short positive response
- :n Indicates a short negative response
Define a new logical key-event whenever:
- The key-event concerned represents a general class of actions, and several commands may want to take a similar action of this type.
- The exact key-event a command implementor chooses may generate violent taste disputes among users, and then the users can trivially change the command in their init files.
- You are using command-case which prevents implementors from specifying non-standard characters for dispatching in otherwise possibly portable code, and you can define and set the logical key-event in a site dependent file where you can mention implementation dependent characters.