At Sat, 8 Mar 2025 07:04:46 -0000 (UTC), mlelstv%serpens.de@localhost (Michael van Elst) wrote: Subject: Re: That DEL key thing... > > I personally would say that emacs caused problems by occupying a > common control character. It never worked nicely on terminals > that sent ^H for the "Backarrow" key. My recollection is that it was GNU Emacs that caused the main problems when RMS decided ^H should be for "help", though I dare say I've forgotten most of how I used Gosling Emacs (or Multics Emacs). In any case it has always been relatively easy to make GNU Emacs behave more intelligently and allow ^H to be the "backspace" (erasing backspace, that is, i.e. `delete-backward-character') key, while ^? can be the help key. Sadly it's never been possible to convince GNU Emacs maintainers to properly honour the current TTY settings, and of course with X11 everything is different again. It's gotten a little bit more bothersome to fix GNU Emacs in the most recent releases, but it can still be done, I think. My setup has only really been tested well with v26.x, so I'm a bit out of date. I do have v29.4 installed on a couple of machines and cursory tests suggests it still works. To really show how confusing things get with Emacs just look at how it defines ^G as the "interrupt" key! :-) (I guess one is "ringing Emacs' bell" in the boxing sense.) > It never was only 'BS vs. DEL' to think that a keyboard > layout is "the wrong way". :) That's why things like termcap/terminfo > were created. There is no "wrong way", but you can learn > how things work. Indeed! The first terminal I used a lot with Unix was the Infoton 400. It had a key labelled with a left arrow at the bottom and "DEL" at the top in the "natural" position of the backspace, so when the machine these terminals were connected to, a VAX 11/780, was upgraded from Unix-32V to 4BSD, and the "newcrt" terminal line discipline was available, it was natural to use ^H as the erase character and ^? (i.e. DEL), as the interrupt character (even though ^C was the default in newcrt). I believe I had been using "rubout" (i.e. DEL) as the interrupt on an older 7th Edition PDP-11/60 I was using prior to and in parallel with the VAX. I carried on with the same settings on VT100's of course, and still do to this day with xterm. I always hated having to work on systems with VT220's -- they had horrible keyboards! I hack NetBSD's defaults to use ^H too, though occasionally I have to be careful with my typing if I use an official version on real hardware. -- Greg A. Woods <gwoods%acm.org@localhost> Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack <woods%robohack.ca@localhost> Planix, Inc. <woods%planix.com@localhost> Avoncote Farms <woods%avoncote.ca@localhost>
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