It seems that current plain FreeBSD kernel generates events that fully corresponds to cons25 entry. It just uses different definitions for kbs and kdch1 wrt Linux, Linux: kbs=\177 kdch1=\E[3~ FreeBSD/cons25 kbs=^H kdch1=\177
Emacs, for instance, does not expect ^H to mean "delete previous character" by default. Instead it invokes the online help, which is annoying to no end. While this can be changed in .emacs, the backspace key not working out of the box is still a serious problem IMO.It seems that upstream FreeBSD plans to switch their $TERM into xterm, via TEKEN_XTERM.Actually the switch to xterm has happened already, more than one year ago: http://svn.freebsd.org/viewvc/base?view=revision&revision=199250. Note that Debian uses kbs=\177 in the xterm terminfo entry, while xterm upstream has kbs=^H.
Given that, it might be the best way to really alter cons25 entry in ncurses package (debian only) to use "kbs=\177 kdch1=\E[3~".
The kfreebsd-8 8.1+dfsg-7 and
freebsd-utils 8.1-3 generates these sequences.
The next debian release will be based of FreeBSD 9.x kernel with xterm
entry for console anyway.
As follows from /usr/share/doc/libncurses5/FAQ "The Debian terminfo entry for xterm doesn't work with some other xterms" the variant cons25-debian have other drawbacks. Please, can someone with deep understanding of terminfo/termcap/... comment on this way ? Petr