With the discussion of the "backspace direction reversion" lately, I
thought I would give it a try.
For the longest time, I've had the key above return (marked BackSpace
on my Sun Type-5 keyboard) set up to return a Delete keysym and had
set my tty erase to ^?.
So I changed my tty erase character and my xmodmap settings so that
backspace returned a backspace.
Then I set delete-key-deletes-forward to t as Steve wanted.
Everything pretty much works as expected[1], and works fine on a sun
console window!
There is one problem: mh-e expects DEL to scroll back the message
buffer. This doesn't work anymore since my backspace key doesn't say
DEL anymore.
I suspect every single package that binds DEL to something is broken
since the backspace key doesn't return DEL anymore. This is easy to
fix for an experienced user, but we should fix all of the packages to
bind the appropriate key depending on the setting of
delete-key-deletes-forward. (Hmm, What happens if the user changes
the value during a session? What should happen?)
Ray
Footnotes:
[1] Well, netscape didn't like it anymore, but that's because I
forgot to remove my .motifbind file to get netscape to understand my
old setup. Changing backspace to generate BS also had a nice effect
on another application I use at work that had BS and DEL hardwired and
therefore broken in my old setup, but corrected now. Cool!