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In article <[🔎] 19971121105542.22942@rch>,
rch@pub.osf.lt (Ricardas Cepas) writes:
>> Linux and other good operating systems already use DEL for backspace.
>
> AFAIK FreeBSD uses Del for delete and BS for backspace.
> And surely this doesn't make it bad OS. The same for the most of others.
So long as `most of the others' doesn't include solaris or HPUX, you're
right.
> Most programs including these packaged for Debian are not for Linux only.
That's irrelevant. After all, they work on other machines that use DEL for
backspace and something else (either ^D or ESC [3~ are possibilities) for
delete. Any good program will use the stty settings, the terminfo, or
/etc/inputrc or some combination thereof.
> There was a message about plans for common libc6 Sun/SCO/*BSD*/Linux
> binaries some time ago.
That's completely irrelevant.
> Just for the Emacs on console maybe you can assign
> F1 to Control-H with loadkeys.
Loadkeys has nothing to do with it. A few seconds thought would show you
why. Indeed, you would make things worse (the current problem is that both
backspace and ^H generate ascii control-H. Do you really want a third key to
do the same?)
_A_ solution for emacs is to bind F1 to the help function, and ^H to
backspace, but that will confuse experienced emacs users who expect ^H to
give them help.
This is all completely pointless. Making backspace do DEL will bring us into
line with the rest of the unix world (even if it's different to other linux
systems) and make emacs do the right thing with no messing around. I can see
no disadvantages to it.
.
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