Date   : Mon, 17 Mar 2014 09:54:20 +0000 (WET)
From   : bbcmicro@... (Peter Coghlan)
Subject: Additional shifted key functions

>
>If they did anything at all, what would you expect Shift-Escape, 
>Shift-Return and Shift-Copy to do?
>
>Eg, on many systems Delete and Shift-Delete return CHR$127 and CHR$8 
>(DELETE and BACKSPACE).
>

I vaguely recall once writing a short utility which called KEYV to check
for shift or control when escape was pressed and implemented a more
forceful escape than usual, enabling exit from assembly language infinite
loops at a cost of possibly exiting at an inappropriate point with no cleanup.

In some disk sector editor, the pressing the copy key wrote the sector being
edited back to the disk.  I hacked it so that shift-copy would write the
current sector back and then load the next sector for editing.  It would have
been nice if shift-copy could have been more easily detected than having to
call KEYV (which might not be processed correctly if the keypress was buffered
in any case) but it seems unlikely that there are a great number of BBC Micro
application writers out there waiting for this to happen at this stage of the
game.

Shift return might usefully return linefeed for some terminal emulator
applications.  Again, even if anyone was writing new applications now, features
such as these would be unlikely to get used as they could not be relied on to
be present in all cases.

Regards,
Peter Coghlan.