On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Greg Troxel wrote:

[...]

A fellow soul... :-)

> BS (^H, 010) is an output code that moves the carriage one place left.
> What those codes do on input is another issue.  Historically (well,
> since V7 or so) DEL (0177) has been used to delete the last character
> typed as input, even on printing terminals (which used some sort of
> encoding to clue in the user, and ^R to redesp/pse/isplay).  The DEL
> key was handy, and used to delete backwards.  The BS key was less
> handy, and was in my recollection not used much (in the 1978 era of
> Seventh Edition).

Two points.
Not all terminals even had/have a backspace key, so it's not a good choice
from a general point of view.

And second, early Unix systems had a high barf-factor, since the default
for erase was '#' unless I misremember seriously...

> This weekend I installed an ultra5 over a serial console with kermit
> on i386 running current.  Typing the backspace key resulted in ^H on
> the single-user shell.  So our erase-is-^H decision is not universal.
> Arguably, remote systems should expect DEL in the pty stream.

It looks like the remote system *was* expecting DEL. It was your -current
i386 system that sent a BS when you pressed the button.
Same problems I have in other words... :-)

> There is a further problem, which is that when running emacs on an
> xterm on a remote system pressing Meta-BS (which should be Meta-DEL)
> results in sending 0210, not 0377, and executes C-M-h (mark-defun)
> instead of M-DEL (backward-kill-word).  So perhaps emacs should rebind
> that too when erase is ^H, but this really seems like propagating
> brokenness.

Aha! I didn't know about that one. But then again, I always try to get
things back to normal, so this don't happen to me. But I'm a bit surprised
that GNU-Emacs now use BackSpace for deleting left. Or is that just the X
keysym BackSpace, and not BS? I know that RMS have a long history of
hating the PC use of backspace to delete, but then again, GNU-Emacs caved
in to the pressure from PC people and rebound ESC ESC to M-:

> I would argue that by default
>
>   the key that is where DEL belongs should generate 0177 in xterms
>   (and behave like delete in emacs) and generate the keysym in X that
>   programs like mozilla expect.
>
>   the other key labeled Delete should generate in X the
>   'delete-forward' keysym (and some ansi sequence in xterm - I don't
>   really care).
>
> But, I realize that different people have different preferences.  So
> it would be really nice to have a global setting (at build time, or
> compile) that defined whether the key that is where DEL should be
> should generate 0177 or 010, and have all the other decisions flow
> from this one setting.

Yup. I'm with you. :-)

>   From: Johnny Billquist <bqt@update.uu.se>
>
>   I wander between the PC display and keyboard and normal, plain, actual
>   text terminals, which behave the way god intended them to. And nowadays
>
> Amen, Brother Johnny!  Your excellent rant about creeping PCisms made
> we want to power up my VT52, and maybe an LSI-11/23!

I even have a VT62 around here. Unfortunately, I've lost track of the
VT05s I used to play with. But plenty of VT320 and VT420 terminals...

	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