Re: [nail-devel] backspace/delete issues

[Gunnar R. <Gun...@pl...>]

Bob Tennent <rd...@cs...> wrote:

> Hi. Since upgrading to Fedora Core 3, I've had problems with these in
> nail (and only in nail). Backspace generates ^H and delete generates
> ^[[3~. This seems to be independent of shell/user/nail-version. Any
> ideas?

In contrast to the Korn shell in emacs mode or applications using GNU
readline, nail leaves the handling of terminal input to the operating
system (canonical input mode). 'cat' or 'ed' still use the same input
method on GNU systems like Fedora too, so you should check if you
encounter the same problem with them.

If you are using xterm, the easiest fix is to put the following lines

XTerm.ttyModes:                 erase ^H
XTerm.VT100.BackarrowKey:       True
XTerm.VT100.Translations:       #override \
	<Key>Delete:    string("\0x7F")\n

in $HOME/.Xresources. By telling xterm how to behave, you become
independent of future changes in the vendor default setup. Other
terminal emulators usually provide similar settings. (This does
not work if an stty call changes the default later, of course.)

Note: The settings above just reflect my personal preference. Other
people have other opinions in this area. For nail, it is not at all
important what one choses, but just that the kernel termios
configuration matches that choice.

See <http://www.ibb.net/~anne/keyboard.html> for a comprehensive
description.

	Gunnar