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Re: terminfo change for screen/eterm?


From: Timothy Allen
Subject: Re: terminfo change for screen/eterm?
Date: Tue, 3 Jan 2023 14:12:02 +1100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.6.0

On 2/1/23 22:51, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
As I recall, ^? is also what actual DEC VT-series terminals emit when
the key-that-is-in-the-backspace location is pressed.  (Unfortunately,
my VT520 and 525 have been in storage for years.)

But--and Thomas can surely correct me here--I think X Consortium or even
MIT Athena xterm (the program goes back to 1984, before X itself), while
otherwise emulating a VT100 (or thereabouts), deliberately used ^H for
this key instead.

On the VT100, the key above Enter sends ^H.

On the VT220 and above, the key above Enter sends ^?, but there's a config setting to default to ^H, and it can be changed during a session by sending an escape sequence.

When Linus wrote the Linux console terminal driver, he made it follow the behaviour of the VT220 he was familiar with, including backspace-as-^?. Following from that precedent, Debian patches all their terminal apps and terminal emulators to default to backspace-as-^?, so that at least within that ecosystem, everything Just Works.

In the same way that terminfo's `lines` and `cols` capabilities have been superseded by TIOCGWINSZ, since modern terminals can be resized, I think terminfo's `kbs` capability should be superseded by checking the value in `stty erase`, for the same reason: modern terminals can change it dynamically.


Tim.



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