On Tue, Jul 11, 2000 at 11:46:44AM +1000, Matthew Dalton wrote:
> It *is* annoying though to have a completely inconsistent keyboard
> interface.
Sounds like your configuration is sprained. I haven't had a
delete key configuration problem for years.
> You start up a shell in an emacs window and then try to run vi in that
> shell (no flames about running vi under emacs, please :) but it wont
> start because it doesn't understand the 'emacs' terminal type.
That _is_ a dumb thing to do, though, because emacs doesn't
offer a full terminal discipline. It's a shell command emitter,
more like a teletype than a CRT. If you want to run vi under
emacs (and I do this myself from time to time) use viper mode.
> Why keyboard configuration is not being handled only in the kernel and
> nowhere else is beyond me. Perhaps someone can explain the historical
> reasons behind it. Historical reasons aside though, is there any reason
> why Linux shouldn't buck the trend and be consistent?
Sure: there are probably a zillion (well, at least a few) small
businesses and third-world setups running on hand-me-down
hardware: wyse dumb terminals and so on, with a Linux server
doing all of the work. That's a perfectly reasonable way for a
small office to do productive work for essentially no setup
cost. You'll find that every single one of the available dumb
terminals deals with the backspace/delete issue differently.
Almost none of them have Alt/Meta keys (some don't even have
escape keys).
--
Andrew
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