Re: Suggestion for terminal package maintainers

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin at cygwin dot com>]

On Jun  1 17:03, Ken Brown wrote:
> The Cygwin console, after some changes made this past weekend, now uses  
> ^? as the default erase character, and this is what is sent by the  
> backspace key instead of ^H  
> (http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2009-05/msg00818.html).  These changes are  
> in effect as of the 2009-05-31 snapshot.  In order to minimize confusion  
> among users, I suggest that maintainers of the various terminal packages  
> (xterm, mintty, rxvt-*) think about making similar changes to the  
> default behavior of their packages the next time they update.
>
> Corresponding changes would have to be made to the terminfo database  
> (and, in some cases, to /etc/termcap).  For example, the change to the  
> Cygwin console requires the following patch:
>
> --- origsrc/terminfo-5.7_20090228/terminfo.src	2009-03-01  
> 00:32:20.000000000 -0500
> +++ src/terminfo-5.7_20090228/terminfo.src	2009-05-30 17:33:13.063590500  
> -0400
> @@ -5221,7 +5221,7 @@ cygwin|ansi emulation for Cygwin,
>  	dl1=\E[M, ed=\E[J, el=\E[K, el1=\E[1K, fsl=^G, home=\E[H,
>  	hpa=\E[%i%p1%dG, ht=^I, ich=\E[%p1%d@, ich1=\E[@,
>  	il=\E[%p1%dL, il1=\E[L, ind=^J, invis=\E[8m, kb2=\E[G,
> -	kbs=^H, kcub1=\E[D, kcud1=\E[B, kcuf1=\E[C, kcuu1=\E[A,
> +	kbs=^?, kcub1=\E[D, kcud1=\E[B, kcuf1=\E[C, kcuu1=\E[A,
>  	kdch1=\E[3~, kend=\E[4~, kf1=\E[[A, kf10=\E[21~,
>  	kf11=\E[23~, kf12=\E[24~, kf13=\E[25~, kf14=\E[26~,
>  	kf15=\E[28~, kf16=\E[29~, kf17=\E[31~, kf18=\E[32~,
>
> Ken
>
> P.S. The change to the Cygwin console arose from a discussion of a  
> problem I was having with emacs.  I'm grateful to Andy Koppe for sorting  
> this out and to cgf for quickly making the required change.

What makes me a bit concerned about this change is that, while we can
change Cygwin's terminfo and termcap files, we can't do that for
existing non-Cygwin installations.  Is it really safe to change the BS
key to ^? now that the "cygwin" terminal type is known to return ^H for
so many years?


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat