Re: XEmacs 21 /vs./ my keyboard: I want my DEL back

Karl Kleinpaste wrote: Yep. Mainly because the upshot of that default behaviour has been to make `How do I get Delete and Backspace to work properly?' one of the most frequently asked questions on comp.emacs.xemacs (aka xemacs(a)xemacs.org). As it happens, the original reason why I subscribed to xemacs(a)xemacs.org a few years back was to ask that very question. The answer at that time was to use `(load-library "delbackspace")', which was basically a big kludge which did loads of stuff to various keymaps, and still only partially worked. I didn't particularly like this solution, questioned it, got flamed, still questioned it, tried to fix it, and discovered that some of the problems went far deeper than my understanding of XEmacs. The bulk of the actual fixing (which is present in 20.4) was done by Gary Foster, and involved systematically hunting down all of the places where backspace, delete, \177, C-h etc were being used (and often misused). As a result, the whole of delbackspace.el was obsoleted by the delete-key-deletes-forward variable, which generally seems to be considered an improvement. The problem which remained in 20.4 was that things were still less than perfect on a tty. If your <- key generated \177, then it was hardcoded to `delete', and thereafter became indistinguishable from the Delete key. You could always reconfigure things to use \010, but then you lose C-h. The changes to events.c involved a significant amount of (often heated) discussion, and certainly weren't made just because someone was bored, or because a few individuals didn't like a particular default setting. They were made primarily because the existing behaviour (which may have `existed in Emacs for something like 15 years') caused real problems for a significant number of people, and the problems couldn't be worked around by changing existing variables. The new behaviour should allow everyone to get the behaviour which they desire. As for the defaults: there is no setting which will please everyone. `Old timers' tend to have a quasi-religious belief that \010 is Backspace and \177 is Delete. Newcomers generally just want stuff to work right. AFAICT, the current behaviour of using whichever code corresponds to the erase character should satisfy everyone except those who have their erase character set incorrectly (and if you don't want the key which generates \177 to be treated as backspace, your erase character probably *shouldn't* be \177). Hardcoding \010 to backspace will annoy anyone whose backspace key generates \177. This seems to cover most current Linux distributions, which in turn probably accounts for more users than all other Unices combined. Furthermore, these users tend to be at the novice end of the scale when it comes to understanding such arcane concepts as character terminals. -- Glynn Clements <glynn(a)sensei.co.uk&gt;