Before, he had no trouble in a RedHat 6.0 intallation. However, in a RedHat 6.2 xterm, his backspace key was generating some bogus escape sequence (^[[3~ rather than ^H). However, the Backspace key generated the Backspace keysym in xev.
To make a long story short, it was an interaction between Exceed, the RedHat 6.2 Xmodmap (which included a binding specific to XFree86 and conflicts with other X servers, ) and the RedHat 6.2 app-defaults for XTerm which include the following little land-mine:
*VT100*translations: #override \I also discovered that in the text console of a RedHat 6.x box that Backspace generates ^? (delete) and Delete generates ^[[3~ (look familiar?). After a little investigation I discovered that this odd little sequence is called Remove.Delete: string(0x1b) string("[3~") \n\
It was at this point that I decided that this was not a mistake. Instead, I concluded that there was a vast conspiracy to introduce user confusion by obfuscating the keyboard.
I decided to visit the RedHat bugzilla pages (since this was clearly outside of VA's control). I searched for "backspace" in the summary for all bugs (even closed or resolved).
The result was a sad chronicle of confusion.
It all stems from one fatally flawed premise:
However, there is room for compromise.
The UNIX veterans are affected by this conspiracy when they use command-line apps: toys that interact with ttys. Therefore, give the command line and cooked I/O the convention that Backspace is ^H and Delete is ^?. This is the way Kernigan and Pike would have wanted it.
The PC folks are used to their GUI apps where Backspace is "remove character backward" and Delete is "remove character forward". Design this into X Windows apps which do not deal with ^H and ^?, but instead deal with the keysyms Backspace and Delete.
Yes, the peasants will get confused when they go to the command line and discover there's UNIX behind the scenes, but they don't belong at the command line unless they know UNIX.
What you should not be doing is hacking the keyboard and ttys to change the definitions of Backspace and Delete that have served UNIX for decades. Leave cooked I/O alone.
Back to White Hot Lesbo Action!
Robert Forsman <thoth@purplefrog.com>