[18066] in Athena Bugs
Re: linux 8.4.9: backspace again
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Sat Jul 29 12:07:16 2000
Message-Id: <200007291607.MAA10012@small-gods.mit.edu>
To: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
Cc: Joseph Sokol-Margolis <seph@MIT.EDU>, bugs@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 29 Jul 2000 11:57:44 EDT."
<200007291557.LAA16386@multics.mit.edu>
Date: Sat, 29 Jul 2000 12:07:12 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
> 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.
Sophistry aside, simple usability demands that the backspace character
should *work* in a tty on a Unix machine by default, both on the
console and in an xterm. On the console, the backspace character
pretty much universally generates the default erase key (^? on
Solaris, Linux, or *BSD; ^H on IRIX). It is sad that Red Hat and
Solaris ship xterm binaries and configurations which cause the
backspace key to generate a different key from the default erase key.
Athena modifies the xterm app-defaults to work around this problem.
