Bug#651035: please decide how terminals should report Alt+letter combinations
Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:
> Russ Allbery wrote:
>> My initial reaction is that I want to see a more compelling justification
>> for standardizing anything here.
> I don't think it's any more or less confusing than delete-versus-
> backspace behavior.
I do, for the simple reason that everyone uses the delete key, but a lot
of people (including a lot of Emacs users) never use the Alt key at all.
> 1. Applications should all behave the same way wrt handling of the
> Meta key in terminals. Advertising the smm capability makes that
> basically impossible.
Basically, I'm dubious the gain from this is worth the effort. Presumably
Thomas has some reason for making xterm's default what it is currently, if
only "it's always been that way." My guess is that most people who are
explicitly using xterm (which usually requires some effort these days,
since the desktop environments all default to something else) are pretty
big on "it's always been that way" behavior. :) (That's what I meant by
the comparison with nvi users.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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