1 Oct
2024
1 Oct
'24
2:11 a.m.
On Mon, 30 Sept 2024 at 16:01, Dan Halbert <halbert(a)halwitz.org> wrote:
On 9/30/24 15:15, Henry Bent wrote:
On Mon, 30 Sept 2024 at 14:08, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
That definitely tracks with an outlier I turned up in my search of sources,
an "apropos.doc" that appears on the CSRG DVD with the sources for CMU
Emacs. It's just a list of mappings from commands to keybindings, for
example:
...
delete-next-character ^D
delete-next-word ESC-D
delete-other-windows ^X1
delete-previous-character ^H
delete-previous-character RUBOUT
...
I'm not particularly an Emacs person, but it looks like it could be the
output from an "apropos" command, or perhaps the input to it.
-Henry
This makes me wonder when the `apropos` command was introduced; surely
the name was also somewhat of an obscure joke ("what is apropos of
listing a directory?" is not exactly the phrase that springs
immediately to mind when wondering how to list a directory).
Looks like it was introduced in 2BSD, written by Bill Joy, though the
4.4BSD manpage claims that it was introduced in 3BSD. Neither the BSD
source nor manpage are particularly enlightening about the choice of name.
I was one of the Berkeley grad students in the office with Bill Joy around
this time. I think the name probably come from the "apropos" command in
Emacs. That command is mentioned here:
https://worrydream.com/refs/Stallman_1979_-_EMACS,_The_Extensible,_Customiz…,
which is dated June 1979, but the Emacs command existed before that date.
The Berkeley source code is dated 1979:
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=2BSD/src/apropos.c
I had used Emacs at MIT as an undergraduate. Bill would sometimes ask me,
"how do they do that in Emacs", or ITS, and then riff on a feature and put
it into vi or whatever. Whether I suggested an "apropos" Unix command or
someone wanted something like that, or I said, "sounds like 'apropos' in
Emacs", I don't remember.