[18065] in Athena Bugs
Re: linux 8.4.9: backspace again
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Sat Jul 29 11:57:49 2000
Date: Sat, 29 Jul 2000 11:57:44 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <200007291557.LAA16386@multics.mit.edu>
To: Joseph Sokol-Margolis <seph@mit.edu>
CC: bugs@mit.edu
In-reply-to: "[18058] in Athena Bugs"
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
| If the proper place to put things is in .Xresources,
It is.
| it would be neat if there there was a default .Xdefaults that said
| that.
The environment is not in the habit of supplying dotfiles that say
"Do not use me, this is a bad idea." Just as we do not supply a .exrc
file that says "putting random crap here is a bad idea," I don't think
we should supply a .Xdefaults file.
In general, .Xdefaults files are a bad idea in *any* environment, and you're
encouraged not to use them. But their behavior is supported and behaves
as it should, though it might be hard to remove it if that was really
desired.
It's not at all clear what you meant by "termcap problems". There's no evidence to show that your problem was termcap related.
You have your erase character set to DEL (delete; ^?), which is the default
for most machines. This is not the same as backspace. I don't know why you
think this is a bug or why you think backspace should work like delete.
I'd be curious if you could explain it.
--jhawk
p.s.: I use a .Xdefaults file, but I think it's probably a bad idea.
