How backspace is broken in Debian
On Mon, Mar 23, 1998 at 01:46:38PM +0300, Carlos Barros wrote:
> I don't know, but in bo the readline was as is, nothing
> configured, so 'home' 'end' 'backspace' keys do nothing right untill
> one configure those keys. What about to insert '.inputrc' file in
> /etc/skell and (of course) in root's directory?
No no no! Evil evil evil!
Now that I've got that out of my system, I should say that hamm already does
something very much like this with /etc/inputrc.
With all due respect to the good intentions of the developers, THIS SOLUTION
IS THE WRONG ONE.
Readline already uses termcap/terminfo. If it doesn't, someone tell me why
it's linked with ncurses.
There are a few problems though:
- libreadline apparently does some default keybindings wrong. For
example, it gets the left/right keys using termcap/terminfo just
fine, but it doesn't seem to get END and Delete necessarily working. The
END problem is probably due to the new ncurses defining termcap mode "@7"
as END, where I think it used a different key before.
- The rxvt terminfo entry is wrong, last I checked. It lists completely
the wrong keys for home/end.
- Standard xterm doesn't conform to official Debian keyboard policy, which
is to use ^? to backspace and ESC[3~ for DEL. The 'xterm' terminfo entry
refers to the original xterm non-Debian policy (I think), which may or
may not be the same as implemented by the new Debian X packages (I'm not
sure). The correct solution: implement the Debian keyboard policy into
our xterm, perhaps using X resources, and then adjust the terminfo entry
to match. It may be most polite to change the TERM variable in that case
to something like xterm-debian, since we are no longer really xterm
compliant. (which is IMHO a good thing, since the default xterm key
bindings are stupid)
My complaint about /etc/inputrc is that it's re-implementing features that
already exist, but have bugs in them. If someone would fix libreadline to
understand @7 (and verify its correct interpretation of other keys) and fix
terminfo to match what the terminal keys actually send, /etc/inputrc would
be unnecessary. As it is, it's an ugly patch to the problem and doesn't fix
it entirely.
If someone doesn't fix this soon, I'll have to start patching readline and
terminfo myself. Do we really want that? I don't :)
Hmm, I wonder if the ncurses maintainer has put in my 'rxvt' terminfo fix
yet.... nope, and no response either. See bug#18662 for some more details.
Have fun,
Avery
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