John Klos <john%ziaspace.com@localhost> writes: > Sometime between RC1 and RC2, something happened to termcap. I often > ssh from a Mac (TERM is xterm-256color) and nothing has changed on > that end for ages. However, now on any NetBSD-7.0_RC2 system, the > shell shows "^?" whenever a backspace is entered and the terminal is > not interactive. Also, in insert mode in vi, one has to use control-h, > as now backspace enters "^?". What changed? It'd be nice if this were > fixed. I haven't noticed a change, but in general there's a long-standing issue about what these characters ought to be. The basic issue is that originally, on DEC terminals (which were more or less the reference hardware for UNIX), there was a delete key in the upper right, often marked DEL, that one pushed to logically remove the last character typed. Then there was a BS key, upper left, that was about carriage control. Hence the erase character was 0177. Then, PC keyboards had backspace where delete should be, and used it as a delete key. Because they said backspace, people on UNIX made them send ^H, and then changed erase to ^H. On my mac, typing the "delete" key (where DEL always was) to a shell sends ^? (which is 0177), which acts as delete (as seen in stty -a). That may because long long ago I unchecked "delete sends ^H". So it sounds like you have delete set correctly on your mac and that the NetBSD system is in erase=^H mode. I remember having to do some work to make all this be ok (except that it isn't ok on the NetBSD console without some patching). There is some complexity in conveying which character is erase from a machine with a keyboard to a machine with a shell, and I agree it seems slightly fragile.
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