On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Christian Biere wrote:

> Johnny Billquist wrote:
> > > For the console:
> > > man gettytab; grep for "erase char".
>
> > That's not the same thing as the default. That's what you get when getty
> > runs. If you start a shell by any other means than through getty, gettytab
> > isn't used.
>
> Eh, sure. If you want to fix it independent from your shell, application,
> login method etc. you could just switch the key labels. If the shell(s)
> you use support readline(3) you could put "^H: delete-char" into your
> ~/.inputrc and <backspace> will then eat the characters from the cursor
> to the left.

I definitely will not change to using backspace to delete characters. That
is not an option. My problem is in the opposite direction. I want DEL to
delete characters (to the left).

In a shell, I can always do "stty erase ^?", but what if the window don't
have a shell prompt? Then I'm in trouble...

Getting X to send the right keycode is easy. We need not discuss that.
That different X programs prefer to delete chars to the left when I send
BackSpace is something I just dislike, and change when I find the right
resources. ttys are actually more problematic. I don't know of any way to
change cchars without writing my own application that does it, or use
stty. But neither option is possible if I have a tty used for a specific
program (such as telnet).
In that case I really need to change the default cchars in the system.
Someone decided some while ago that ^H should be bound to erase instead of
^?, which it was previously. I'd like to change it back for my machines.

> > No no no. Caps Lock is something else.
>
> I misunderstood you because I use it as often as Scroll Lock. (Wow, it
> really works with wscons and it doesn't even have your Caps Lock problem.)

I play with some DEC OSes as well, and while writing MACRO-11, I prefer
having caps lock on sometimes... :-)

	Johnny

Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol