From owner-freebsd-questions  Wed Mar 24 19: 3: 9 1999
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Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 22:05:33 +0000
From: Rob <drifter@stratos.net>
To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: BACKSPACE v. DELETE
Message-ID: <19990324220533.A41467@stratos.net>
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     Hi guys,

     I got a puzzle here.  I'm having problems with getting my xterms
to properly interpret my BACKSPACE (^H) character as the erase character.
It gets kind of complicated, and I'll try to be brief.  I'm using KDE
as my desktop manager.

     o When I log in through character-based getty/login and then use
       `startx &' from the command line, launching xterm from KDE works
       fine. An `stty -a | grep erase' reveals that my erase key is
       properly set to ^H.
     o But when I launched either kvt or konsole under KDE under the
       above circumstances, an `stty -a | grep erase' shows that erase
       is set to ^?.

     Okay, so it has to do with the KDE terminals, right?  Except:

     o When I log in through kdm, both kvt and konsole behave as previous
       described.
     o But, unfortunately, under xterm the erase key is ALSO set to
       ^?.

     So, the method of starting my X session is, apparently, a
factor as well.
     I know that child processes inherit stty settings, so when I log in
with a character-based terminal (and erase is properly set to BACKSPACE),
a `startx' allows my X session and all of its children to properly
inherit the settings.  So, this is what I figured:

     o The getty/login processes sets stty erase to ^H and kdm sets it
       to DELETE.  So, if you launch X-windows with startx, you inherit
       ^H and from kdm DELETE.
     o kvt and konsole are overriding default terminal settings (yet I
       can't figure out how to set either KDE terminal emulators to
       the proper defaults.  They only provide options to convert a BACKSPACE
       to DELETE.)

     So, how do I solve this problem, so all graphical terminals have the
proper settings by default without resulting to a complex series of aliases
and configuration files?
     Launching these terminals by default doesn't read .profiles (or
.zprofiles).  I tried `stty erase ^H' in my xsession, but that doesn't
work.  I tried logging in with different desktop/window managers and
still have the same problem.
     I looked at login.conf to get some clues, but could find nothing there.
Is there anywhere that I missed?

     -Rob


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