[18073] in Athena Bugs
Re: linux 8.4.9: backspace again
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kev)
Mon Jul 31 10:04:11 2000
Message-Id: <200007311404.KAA29706@multics.mit.edu>
To: tb@MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)
cc: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>, John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>,
Joseph Sokol-Margolis <seph@MIT.EDU>, bugs@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "29 Jul 2000 15:53:32 EDT."
<u1hitto4ssj.fsf@home-on-the-dome.mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2000 10:04:06 -0400
From: Kev <klmitch@MIT.EDU>
> > 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.
I'm sorry, but that is not the case; on a stock RH-6.2 install, I have
the following lines in my .Xresources to make xterm do the correct thing:
XTerm*backarrowKey: false
NXTerm*backarrowKey: false
Normally, the shell hides the problem, but if you do cat > /dev/null and
try to use backspace (all in an xterm, of course), you get ^H.
--
Kevin L. Mitchell <klmitch@mit.edu>
