Re: gnome-terminal delete/backspace mess

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com> writes:
> > I'm happy to add --enable-swap-del-bs and --enable-del-sends-del or
> > whatever to configure.in, making it a compile-time thing, as long as I
> > can lose the user-settable options.
> 
> That is really not acceptable.  That is equivalent to killing the
> feature completely as far as an end user is concerned.  
> 

That's right, that is the whole point. ;-) The feature is confusing
and rarely useful. Even if you were in this situation, I have no idea
which of the two buttons in the settings dialog I would check, or why
I would do so.

Furthermore, having a prefs setting for this is wrong; because I don't
want to break all my local terminals, I just want to change it while I
am logged in to the lame remote machine.

So, if you want to solve this problem, I think a better way to solve
it would be a menu item that feeds an stty command to the terminal,
next to the current Reset menu item. It could be called "Fix delete
key" or something. Then there is a single thing I can click, and it
only has a temporary effect. Still somewhat confusing, but not as bad.

Though I would tend to simply ignore the issue - the failure mode when
ssh'ing to sgi/hp or whatever is not severe IIRC, one of delete or
backspace still works right. And long-term we can get hp and sgi to
fix their stuff.

This is the classic problem we had with X clipboards, where Emacs and
a few other clients were broken, people did broken stuff to work with
broken clients, so then they were all broken, but then some people
read the spec and fixed their clients, and around and around.  You go
around in circles once you start working around this sort of
interoperability issue - the only way to make it work is to say "It
works as follows; everyone must do that."

Havoc