Suggestion for terminal package maintainers

[Ken Brown]

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.