@b0rk @mjd My memory is that there was a big schism...

@b0rk @mjd My memory is that there was a big schism in the physical terminal world about what the 'backspace' key generated. Many terminals had it generate Ctrl-H, but some used DEL; I believe DEC terminals such as the VT-100 were in the DEL camp, and they were very popular. This carried over to Unix workstations, with vendors doing different mappings (eg SGI made their 'backspace' key generate Ctrl-H in a default configuration; DEC used DEL of course).

Like 30 October at 1:18 | Wall-to-wall | Open on mastodon.social

3 comments

Chris Siebenmann

@b0rk @mjd Today, X on Linux has a 'BackSpace' keysym and a 'Delete' keysym, generated by their respective keyboard keys, but I believe that all terminal emulators map both of them to DEL by default (xterm and gnome-terminal certainly do). Things like browsers tend to make the big BackSpace key delete characters to the left of the cursor (what you expect) and the 'Delete' key delete to the right, which can be a surprise.

30 October at 1:22 | Open on mastodon.social

Jef Poskanzer :batman:

@cks @b0rk @mjd With Unix caught in the middle of the schism, yeah. I had a small part in resolving things: at a Usenix 'ask the BSD team' session, I stood up and suggested that they deal with it by having two erase characters in the tty driver. And they said, Ok! Thus was born erase2.

30 October at 2:12 | Open on mastodon.social

Petru Ratiu

@cks @b0rk @mjd To this day my circle of IRC friends uses the mini-joke of ^H^H^H being poorly translated backspace presses even though we collectively forgot what chain of systems was needed to produce this specific "terminal mojibake".

30 October at 2:38 | Open on hachyderm.io