Date   : Sun, 15 Jul 1990 16:35:27 PDT
From   : cwr@pnet01.cts.com (Will Rose)
Subject: Wordstar backspace and delete

A couple of people asked me how to change around the BS and DEL keys in
WordStar 3.3.  Off the top of my head, I thought Wsinstall would do it, but
this option must have been added only in later versions.  Since I loathe a
destructive backspace, I've never tried to change from the standard, but
below is a way of patching ws.com if you need to; I've tested it, and at
least for me, it works.
 
Ws.com has a number of keystroke despatch tables, which each consist of a
number of four-byte sequences.  The first two bytes are the key(s) to be
matched, and the second two are some form of jump location - I've not 
bothered to find out what.
 
The despatch table needed here is the file-editing command table, whose
start is marked by the internal label 'VTAB'.  In my version of 3.3, this
is at address 489h.  The four relevant keystrokes are ^S, ^H, ^G, and DEL.
For those keyboards that cannot produce DEL, Wordstar has an equivalent,
^_; I've ignored this.
 
We want to leave ^S and ^G alone, and make ^H act like DEL, and DEL act
like ^G.  Using DDT, this is done by changing the following locations
in my (3.3) version of ws.com:
 
    location 4a3h from dah to 43h  - for ^H
    location 4a4h from 63h to 68h
    location 543h from 43h to 64h  - for DEL 
    location 544h remains as 68h
 
If you're using winstall, you can use offsets from VTAB.
 
Function or arrow keys are more difficult; there seem to be two approaches.
 
There is a label UCONI, which I found at 29dh, which marks the user console
input routine.  (The routine before it is for console status, UCNSTA, and the
one following is console output, UCONO.)  One way to install function keys
would be to add an input routine that recognises them and translates them
into a keycode sequence (such as ^S or ^D) that Wordstar can understand.
 
The other approach is via a label XTAB, which I found at 655h.  This marks
the end of the (official) file-editing command dispatch table that starts at
VTAB; there is room, (I think) for a further 9 four-byte entries.  If you add
the keybcodes for function and arrow keys, and vector them to addresses that
are already used by standard Wordstar commands, you should get the required
result.  I haven't tried this.
 
Good luck - Will
 
"If heaven too had passions  | Will Rose
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