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Re: Suggestion for terminal package maintainers


On 6/3/2009 7:09 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
On Jun 2 17:47, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
On Jun 2 11:39, Christopher Faylor wrote:
On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 05:33:27PM +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
Maybe it is, that's why I'm asking.  But, if we do that, shouldn't
Ctrl-Backspace return ^H as in xterm?  So far the Cygwin console
returned ^H without and ^? with Ctrl, now it returns ^? in both
variations.
IMO, cygwin's console == linux console.  On two of my systems (Fedora
and Gentoo) CTRL-Backspace returns Backspace on the console.  Now that
I'm at work, I see that CTRL-Backspace returns ^H on my Ubuntu system.
But, so far, the CTRL-Backspace == Backspace contingent is winning.
Uh, oh, hmm.  I was always under the impression we try to be as xterm
compatible as possible, rather than the Linux console.

I found a problem with this change. Tcsh's default keybinding for ^? is backward-delete-word, while ^H is bound to backward-delete-char. So far it was possible to use Alt-Backspace to delete a word. This doesn't work anymore since ^? is now mapped to backward-delete-char due to the tty erase being set to ^?, and Alt-Backspace only returning a NUL byte.

Using Alt-Backspace to delete a word works fine in the Linux console.
This means, the keymapping for Alt-Backspace does not return ^? but one
of the other character sequences bound to backward-delete-word:

  tcsh$ bindkey | grep backward-delete-word
  "^W"           ->  backward-delete-word
  "\210"         ->  backward-delete-word
  "\377"         ->  backward-delete-word
  "^[^H"         -> backward-delete-word
  "^[^?"         -> backward-delete-word

The problem is, for some reason the sequence generated by Alt-Backspace
is not visible in od output.  Neither for the Linux console, nor in
xterm.  Does anybody know the sequence?  I failed to figure that out via
google.

Even not knowing the sequence returned by Alt-Backspace, AFAICS, the
right thing to do is to send either ^[^? or \377, dependent on the
setting of dev_state->metabit.  That's how the META key is usually
defined and it brings back the old Alt-Backspace functionality to tcsh.

As long as you're changing the Cygwin console to be more compatible with linux and/or xterm, let me just mention that some key combinations involving the control key don't work in the Cygwin console the way they do in linux and xterm. Here are two specific examples I've noticed, but I haven't made an exhaustive search:


1. Control-<space> appears to generate <space> in the cygwin console.

2. Control-Alt-<any key> does not appear to generate anything (or maybe it generates NUL).

Ken


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