Date: Sat, 4 Mar 1995 09:11:09 +0100 (MET) From: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> To: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD-current users) Subject: Re: backspace now broken Message-ID: <199503040811.JAA00523@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <199503040648.WAA18595@gndrsh.aac.dev.com> from "Rodney W. Grimes" at Mar 3, 95 10:48:45 pm
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To avoid any political wars, this will be my last posting to this subject. I'd kindly ask all people replying to kill me out of the Cc list -- it's enough that i get it from the list. As Rodney W. Grimes wrote: > > ... The IBM PC by tradition and by > label on the keyboard ``backspace'' should generate a ^H, doing otherwise > is something that should be left to personal preference via syscons keyboard > remapping or xmodmap. My keyboards do not have any keys labelled ``Backspace'', they all have a big and easy to find key top-right labelled ``<--''. This implies that most people will hit this key when they intend to delete the character last typed. > What code is generated by the key has little to do with what traditionally > has been set as the tty erase character. No, people mostly don't expect that key to generate any particular code (why should they bother with any numerical codes?), they simply expect it to delete something (instead of printing ^H when pressing it). Since our terminal settings have always been erase=^? by default (and a majority here seems to agree with this), it's stupid to map the key most people prefer when erasing text to something else than the tty erase char. > This has changed back and forth at least 3 times, probably 4,... I can remember only one change: the move to syscons. All other console drivers have been using DEL consistently. I even checked the CVS source for kbdtables.h, syscons did never change it (at least, there's no log message saying so) until now. So we are now *consistent* again. SysV's tend to use erase=^H, yes, but don't forget: they also use intr=^? -- so do you wanna change this, too? (But then again, that's the reason why they map the big grey key to ^H, since their users also use it to erase text.) All this ^?/^H/^C hick-hack has been bothering me for a long time. I really *hate* those folks who once broke the consistency back in very old days! Now, there will be always a need to stty something when logging in back and forth across several systems... But please, at least for the own system, keep the default stty settings consistent with the keyboard mapping. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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