> When you are on a PC keyboard, do you really use the
> delete key rather 
> than the backspace?

Given that some combinations of terminal emulators and
rlogin or ssh and remote system behavior don't properly
carry forward whatever one's local behavior is, I've
dealt with things that seem to switch on the fly from
using either both, or just one or the other.  And I've
used keyboards from everyone from Teletype to Burroughs
to DEC to IBM to Sun to (you name it).  So unless I'm going
at absolute max speed, it just doesn't matter any more to me;
which is maybe part of why I don't count convenient as very
important compared to abstractly correct; after awhile,
_everything_ got to be about equally convenient or inconvenient.

> It is just located in an inconvenient place. Classic
> Sun Keyboard 
> layouts (there are several) have
> typically placed the delete key in the main section
> of the keyboard 
> roughly where the backspace
> key is on a PC keyboard. I can totally understand why
> people use the 
> delete key in this case.

Well the one in front of me now (Type 6 USB/Unix layout)
has two delete keys: one in the group above the arrow keys,
and one on the numeric keypad.  Or Ctrl-? also works as delete,
mostly.

FWIW, I usually set Ctrl-H (Backspace) as my erase character,
but like I said, that doesn't always propagate like it's supposed to.
Even if all the Solaris I run into did it the same, I suppose something
else (AIX, Ultrix, whatever) would go and be different.  So I just
deal with it.

> I don't think it is too much for the keyboard driver
> to change the 
> mapping for different keyboard
> layouts.

More like the other way around, that the tty driver would
tweak its defaults based on the layout reported by the keyboard
driver.  But that only works on the console.  The notion almost
reminds me of the pre-Motif Interleaf GUI, which had menus with smart
defaults; once you got used to it, most of the time you'd just click once
and move over to take the defaults.  But until you did get used to it,
having the behavior changing like that felt like riding out an earthquake;
ground shifting under your feet.

A problem with that is that there are probably layouts that can't be
distinguished by software alone.  (in fact, I'm fairly sure there are,
although whether they're not pre-USB and obsolete, I don't recall)

The consistency issue _is_ a little annoying; I'd live with a key on
the underside of the keyboard if it worked everywhere.  And the
tty driver defaults alone wouldn't take care of that, IMO; some terminal
emulators try to do you different favors in that regard (and apparently
Java has ideas of its own).

So yeah, you can edit the bottom line of options.conf and change :7f: to :8:
and reboot, but don't be surprised if there are things that still don't just
do what you want.

> > Heck, I'll admit to being an arrogant jerk if you
> will first.
> > But not before.
> >   
> Touchy, Touchy.... Please stick to playing the ball,
> not the player!

I'm just as stuck on my views as you are on yours, and every
bit as willing to be obnoxious about them; that's what I meant.
 
 
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