Del & Backspace Key - Linux Termcap

[John Esak]

Wow, Bill, this was a very useful message. Not only am I going to implement
lots of it right away, but I'm going to save this message in my tech-tips
folder which has been very sparse lately.  I've been neglecting keeping
things I know I might want later... Because it is so easy to go back and
find them in the routine folders.  But, I've found that finding things you
want gets harder as you get older. :-)

I'm not at the point where I can't find my own as*h*le with both hands...
But moving in that direction. :-)

Thanks for these tips.

John
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: filepro-list-bounces+john=valar.com at lists.celestial.com 
> [mailto:filepro-list-bounces+john=valar.com at lists.celestial.co
m] On Behalf Of Bill Campbell
> Sent: Sunday, October 11, 2009 12:56 PM
> To: filepro-list at lists.celestial.com
> Subject: Re: Del & Backspace Key - Linux Termcap
> 
> On Sat, Oct 10, 2009, Tom Aldridge wrote:
> >OK, here's a whole nuther can of worms.
> >
> >Can anyone give me some direction on getting the delete key 
> to act like 
> >cancel as in "Del-Cancel" like SCO emulation did?
> >... and Backspace to move left one character?
> >
> >While I have the xterm issue resolved for people running 
> linux desktops, 
> >I have others running Putty or Zoc.
> 
> This topic has been discussed at length here several times.
> 
> I strongly suggest using ctrl-C for cancel in all terminals
> rather than the sco-unique DEL key for cancel.  ctrl-c works on
> pretty much any OS other than SCO including all versions of
> Linux, every *nix platform I've ever used, MS-DOS, and Windows.
> 
> Put this in your /etc/profile or FilePro startup script.
> 
> stty intr '^c'
> 
> To further complicate things, many xterms like to use the DECish
> DEL for the backspace key instead of ctrl-h so hitting backspace
> is likely to be interpreted as a cancel on SCO systems from xterm.
> Getting Linux xterms to send ctrl-h instead of ctrl-? (DEL) can
> be a bit ``interesting''.  I'm attaching the XTterm file I put in
> my $HOME directory on all systems that sets up some non-standard
> options including this.  The interesting bits are near the bottom
> with backarrowKeyIsErase, charClass, and ttyModes in particular.
> 
> The backarrowKeyIsErase should tell the xterm to use ctrl-h
> instead of the DECish ctrl-?
> 
> The charClass is a bit of magic I found that causes double clicks
> to generally highlight interesting things like full file paths,
> IP addresses, and such making it easy to copy/paste by double
> clicking the pasting with the middle mouse button.  Don't ask me
> to understand it.  It's one of those things I found in an e-mail
> about xterms, and have used since.
> 
> The ttyModes does the same things for xterms as stty does at the
> terminal interface so should probably be used in conjunction with
> a similar command at startup.
> 
> Bill
> -- 
> INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
> URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
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> 
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>