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Re: Suggestion for terminal package maintainers
On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 02:48:51PM +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>On Jun 1 17:03, Ken Brown wrote:
>> The Cygwin console, after some changes made this past weekend, now uses
>> ^? as the default erase character, and this is what is sent by the
>> backspace key instead of ^H
>> (http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2009-05/msg00818.html). These changes are
>> in effect as of the 2009-05-31 snapshot. In order to minimize confusion
>> among users, I suggest that maintainers of the various terminal packages
>> (xterm, mintty, rxvt-*) think about making similar changes to the
>> default behavior of their packages the next time they update.
>>
>> Corresponding changes would have to be made to the terminfo database
>> (and, in some cases, to /etc/termcap). For example, the change to the
>> Cygwin console requires the following patch:
>>
>> --- origsrc/terminfo-5.7_20090228/terminfo.src 2009-03-01
>> 00:32:20.000000000 -0500
>> +++ src/terminfo-5.7_20090228/terminfo.src 2009-05-30 17:33:13.063590500
>> -0400
>> @@ -5221,7 +5221,7 @@ cygwin|ansi emulation for Cygwin,
>> dl1=\E[M, ed=\E[J, el=\E[K, el1=\E[1K, fsl=^G, home=\E[H,
>> hpa=\E[%i%p1%dG, ht=^I, ich=\E[%p1%d@, ich1=\E[@,
>> il=\E[%p1%dL, il1=\E[L, ind=^J, invis=\E[8m, kb2=\E[G,
>> - kbs=^H, kcub1=\E[D, kcud1=\E[B, kcuf1=\E[C, kcuu1=\E[A,
>> + kbs=^?, kcub1=\E[D, kcud1=\E[B, kcuf1=\E[C, kcuu1=\E[A,
>> kdch1=\E[3~, kend=\E[4~, kf1=\E[[A, kf10=\E[21~,
>> kf11=\E[23~, kf12=\E[24~, kf13=\E[25~, kf14=\E[26~,
>> kf15=\E[28~, kf16=\E[29~, kf17=\E[31~, kf18=\E[32~,
>>
>> Ken
>>
>> P.S. The change to the Cygwin console arose from a discussion of a
>> problem I was having with emacs. I'm grateful to Andy Koppe for sorting
>> this out and to cgf for quickly making the required change.
>
>What makes me a bit concerned about this change is that, while we can
>change Cygwin's terminfo and termcap files, we can't do that for
>existing non-Cygwin installations. Is it really safe to change the BS
>key to ^? now that the "cygwin" terminal type is known to return ^H for
>so many years?
Yes, many Cygwin programs will have CTRL-H hard-coded into them
currently.
However, I assume that every linux distribution had to go through something
like this at some point. The CTRL-H thing always ends up impacting me
in strange ways. I don't know yet if the ^? change will impact me in new
exciting ways, though.
I just thought that since 1.7.x is supposed to be a major change this would
be the time to move towards more compliance with linux.
cgf