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?