Backspace

[Derek Ragona]

At 10:54 PM 8/11/2007, d.Z. wrote:
>Hello,
>
>I'm a new user to FreeBSD and Unix. I used Solaris 10 last week in
>lab, and found there is a difference between them.
>
>When Solaris is installed, press backspace will give you ^H, you'll
>have to "stty erase ^H" to solve this problem. But with FreeBSD 6.1,
>when first installed, backspace is always bounded to erase last
>character, even I have "stty erase ^?" and "stty erase2 ^?", backspace
>still deletes last character input. Does any body know why is this
>happening?

Solaris by default uses csh for user accounts.  The backspace key 
assignment and for that matter, all key assignments are dependent on the 
both the shell and terminal definition.  Reassigning keys is typical for 
your shell's startup profile file .cshrc for csh and .bashrc for bash.


>And strange thing is with default setting (before stty erase and
>erase2 to ^?), when I use Emacs, C-h will give me back space, instead
>of help. I know this is desirable for experts, but I'm really new so
>just want to follow the instruction first.

Applications like the shell you use interpret the terminal definition and 
may or may not use the same key assignments.  Most applications like the 
shells in UNIX environments have startup files to customize the key 
assignments and in the case of editors even define macros.

Hope this helps.

         -Derek

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