Annoying screen backspace problem

[Derek Martin]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 07:18:13PM -0500, Dan Jenkins wrote:
> Derek Martin wrote:
> >
> ><... snipped a long, informative post ...>
> 
> Thank you for that good explanation. It reminded me of so much I
> had forgotten. (Pushed from my mind might be the better phrase.)

<bow>  You're welcome.  :)

On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 08:34:28PM -0500, Paul Lussier wrote:
> Derek Martin <invalid at pizzashack.org> writes:
> 
> > So really, there are two problems which have lead to the sad state
> > of affairs bollixing up the backspace key.  One is bad coding
> > practices -- programs which assume that ^H is supposed to be
> > backspace, or that ^? is, instead of letting the terminal driver do
> > the translation as intended.  The second is lazy or ignorant system
> > administrators who have misconfigured termcap/terminfo databases.
> 
> And the second has largely been relegate to ignorant/lazy system
> *vendors*, as most sysadmins nowadays don't even know the termcap db
> even exists!  In my 10+ years as a sysadmin, I've *never* had to touch
> the termcap db (unless I was completely replacing it).  If it's been
> horked, it came that way from the vendor :)

Sure, but OTOH there's a lot the vendor can't account for.  For
example, if you bought a bunch of HP 900XX terminals, you'd find that
they can be configured to emulate a VT100, vt220, vt320, and/or
possibly others.  You'll find that a number of terminal capabilities
can be turned on or off in the terminal's configuration screen.  And,
last but not least, you'll find that the backspace key can be
configured to one of several settings...

Over time, the vendor might change the default settings, or the
terminals might be configured differently to suit different
applications which expect certain specific behavior.

In the end, it's going to be the system admin's responsibility to make
sure the terminals are configured correctly/consistenly, and that the
termcap entries are defined properly/consistenly, etc.

For those who might think, "But no one uses terminals anymore, so it
doesn't matter..."  I know of at least one company which still has
thousands of dumb terminals in use (or at least did when last I had
contact with them, which wasn't all that long ago), and I think it's
not all that uncommon to find them still in places like government
offices, schools, and libraries...

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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