default shell behavior with aterm

[Derek Ragona]

At 05:42 PM 4/11/2007, Chad Perrin wrote:
>I've had to solve a problem with unexpected shell behavior when using
>aterm (my favorite terminal emulator) a couple of times now.  This seems
>to be limited to aterm -- the same problems do not arise at the TTY
>console or in xterm.
>
>Back when I first set up the workstation I'm currently using, with
>FreeBSD 6.1, one of the unexpected differences from what's familiar to
>me (having come from Debian GNU/Linux) was the fact that in aterm the
>open parenthesis character, "(", would behave as a backspace.  I solved
>the problem at the time, with a bit of searching around.  Part of what I
>did to solve the problem involved entering the following command into
>the .bashrc file for my user account:
>
>   stty erase2 '^?'
>
>Since then, something happened (I just wasn't careful enough with my
>edits that file, I guess) to that line.  Last night, I found myself
>trying to remember how to solve the problem of REPLs like OCaml's
>toplevel and the interactive UCBLogo shell treating the open parenthesis
>character as a backspace.
>
>Another part of the solution the first time around -- and one that has
>not gone away and needed to be refixed -- is to comment out these lines
>in the file /usr/ports/x11/aterm/Makefile:
>
>   .if !defined(WITH_BSDEL)
>   CONFIGURE_ARGS+=       --disable-backspace-key --disable-delete-key
>   .endif
>
>My question is this:
>
>Is there some (good) reason that aterm's Makefile contains these lines?
>Is there some logically justified reason for causing aterm to break the
>principle of least surprise in this fashion -- since it obviously works
>differently (surprise!) from the behavior of other means of using the
>shell?
>
>Is this a bug I should submit?


Actually you might want to have an entry added for this terminal to 
terminfo and termcap databases.  I don't see an entry for it, and suspect 
it is using one of the generic definitions.

         -Derek


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