[18070] in Athena Bugs
Re: linux 8.4.9: backspace again
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)
Sat Jul 29 15:53:37 2000
To: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
Cc: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>, Joseph Sokol-Margolis <seph@MIT.EDU>,
bugs@MIT.EDU
From: tb@MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)
Date: 29 Jul 2000 15:53:32 -0400
In-Reply-To: Greg Hudson's message of "Sat, 29 Jul 2000 12:07:12 -0400"
Message-ID: <u1hitto4ssj.fsf@home-on-the-dome.mit.edu>
Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU> writes:
> > 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.
If you are doing things in the normal RedHat way, and not the
oh-so-special Athena way, then the <-- sends the right key on Red Hat
to make a default Red Hat shell erase, in all contexts, just like it
should.
