Thanks for the responses. I did try the "cat" experiment and it showed
exactly the same situation as cmucl, namely the BS key worked properly
using Xterm but echoed ^H when using gnome-terminal.
I tried Tim Daly's suggestion of changing preferences in gnome-terminal
("Swap delete/backspace" is the one that worked) and that made its
behavior match that of Xterm. And as was clear from the "cat"
experiment, this also made the BS key work in cmucl with gnome-terminal.
So I guess my (default) stty setting wants Del for the erase function
and now that is what gnome-terminal is generating. Alternatively, I can
let gnome-terminal do its default thing (generate BS) and use stty to
have that be the erase character. But bash and tcsh work either way
since they are (apparently) written to do so. At work, I sometimes use
csh, and it does not exhibit this "either way" behavior (i.e. it is like
cat and cmucl). I think it all makes sense now. Thanks for educating me
about something which, I now realize, was in fact off-topic.
-- David
Pierre Mai wrote:
>As someone else has already pointed out, applications are free to
>interpret keys anyway they want, so likely your shell is interpreting
>^H as delete-backwards, too. CMUCL OTOH, just relies on the normal
>line-editing of the TTY layer (when in line-buffered mode), so only
>the stty settings affect it. For all intents and purposes, the same
>should happen when you do
>
>cat > /dev/null
>
>for example.
>
>Regs, Pierre.
>
>
>
