> If your delete key works in all cases, you have probably configured it
> yourself and not touched it for years.
Very probably. My .bash_profile is getting close to 10 years old.
> It's not a dumb thing to do, it's an inquisitive thing to do. I'm
> learning emacs at the moment (have always been a vi/vim user) and
> basically wanted to see if it was possible.
Ah. Well, now that you've inquisited it, you can agree that it's not
something that you really want to do ;-)
> I'm not saying that we should drop support for old equipment.
> I'm saying
> that keyboard configuration should be done in a single place, and all
> programs should get their key interpretation from that configuration.
> This doesn't have to exclude the use of Wyse terminals etc. They would
> still have their own configurations.
Hmm. History gets in the way, unfortunately. The trouble is that the
"traditional" place for handling delete (and other special key) behaviour in
Unix was the tty driver: it's part of the line discipline. That's why you
can tweak the keys with the stty command. However (a) X, and the X-keyboard
modules don't use ttys: they use XKeyboard Events, which deal with key-up,
key-down, and a whole bunch of keyboard specific things that don't fit into
the ASCII model. However (b) modern terminal sessions, shells, and so on,
turn off the traditional tty discipline (go into "raw" mode), so that they
can extend the traditional functionality with history searches, command and
path completion, and so forth. Obviously, they have their own ideas about
what control codes should do what. Lastly: PCs, and many terminals were
getting happy with the notion that the BkSp key should be ascii 0x08 (^H),
and Del should be (0x7f) and do delete forwards, but VT102 terminals only
have the one key, Delete, which emitted 0x7f, and Emacs had enshrined ^H as
the help prefix forevermore. Stalemate.
If you don't care about VT102 or ANSI terminal compatability, and never run
Emacs in a terminal window, then you can probably survive happily with a
BkSp key that is translated to ^H. Your best bet, however, is to figure out
what does what, where, and have your initialisation scripts set things up
accordingly.
--
Andrew
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