Bug#326200: xterm: please set eightBitInput: false by default so Alt is usable as such
On 5 November 2010 21:40, Thomas Dickey <dickey@his.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Nov 2010, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>
>> Reuben Thomas wrote:
>>
>>> What is wrong with patching xterm so that it defaults to eightBitInput
>>> being false rather than true, as other terminals do?
>>
>> Nothing I can see except that we are in a freeze. It is probably
>> worth making the change anyway, but I will leave that to the emacs
>> users.
>>
>> Re interaction with metaSendsEscape: of course it would not confuse
>> new users, but would existing configurations might start to misbehave?
>
> probably. It's configurable at runtime (menu and escape sequence) because
> this is an area where half the users want it one way, the other half the
> other way.
Why do some users want it the other way? I'm still looking for a
reason (other than the one than Jonathan quoted about bash, which
seems to have things the wrong way round). This is precisely the sort
of thing that would be good to add to some documentation so that it's
obvious that both ways have pros and cons, and hence, not only will
users be able to understand which setting they are likely to want, but
also stop complaining about the default (as I am doing!). I'm also
interested to know why this is the default in xterm, but not in
gnome-terminal, konsole or unicode-rxvt. Is it the default in any
other modern terminal?
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