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Linus backspace linux

This is from a thread where various people argued with Linus Torvald about how backspace and DEL should and should not work.

You can dind the Linux and SCO backspace/DEL thread here.

Do note that Linus was right..

From: Tony Lawrence <tony@aplawrence.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.unix.sco.misc
Subject: Re: Linux and SCO
Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2000 13:04:39 GMT

Linus Torvalds wrote:

> T.E.Dickey <dickey@shell.clark.net> wrote:

> >ASCII backspace is control/H, aka BS (127 is DEL).
> 
> This is an old, and totally bogus argument.
> 
> ASCII BS (the character) is indeed \010, aka character 8, aka ^H.
> 
> But that has absolutely nothing to do with the _keyboard_button_ that
> often has a back arrow on it, and also often these days has the text
> "Back Space" on it.
> 
> And guess what? People _expect_ it to _delete_ the preceding character.

Yes, they do.  And that's why erase is set to CTRL-H on the
SCO box I am using this very moment as I write this.  On the
Linux box that sits half naked beside it awaiting
installation of tape drive and other things I need before it
can become my desktop machine, erase is, of course, CTRL-?
or 127.   When I telnet from a SCO machine to a Linux
machine, resetting erase and intr is only the beginning of
what I need to do to avoid driving myself crazy.

Of course, once I switch to Linux as my deskop, the problem
will be reversed when I access customer's SCO machines from
that box.   And if I happen to be at the client's site, who
knows which machine I'll be sitting at and which machines
I'll need to get to- increasingly I have more and more
clients running both SCO and Linux.

Admittedly, it's SCO's damn fault.  It would have been
smarter to make the SCO console and xterms act like a vt100
as you did with Linux.  But what's done is done, and it was
done a long time ago, so it's much too late now, 

What I need is a terminal emulator, ideally open source, and
that has the usual ansi, vt100 and perhaps wyse emulations,
but more importantly, has both Linux and SCO console
personalities (and it would have to account for Unixware
peculiarities too, I guess). When going from SCO to Linux it
also would need to take care of those damn color issues that
leave me blindly typing purple text on a purple background.
With that, I could work comfortably cross-platform without
constantly screwing up.   I'm not sure what other issues
might come up going from Linux to SCO; I guess I'll find out
as I start doing that more..

I just had a thought- I have Merge on my SCO box and Win4Lin
( /Reviews/win4lin.html ) on Linux.  I
can run one of the Windows terminal emulators- just kidding
:-)

-- 
Tony Lawrence (tony@aplawrence.com)
SCO/Linux articles, help, book reviews, tests, 
job listings and more : 

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