Re: gnome-terminal delete/backspace mess

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com> writes:

> > That's right, that is the whole point. ;-) The feature is confusing
> > and rarely useful. Even if you were in this situation, I have no idea
> > which of the two buttons in the settings dialog I would check, or why
> > I would do so.
> 
> One thing is removing over-configuration from application, because we
> can make a judgement call on it (Joel on UI, which is where you seem
> to be coming from).  
> 
> But in this case a judgement call on the feature is wrong, because you
> can not make this decision for others.  You have no way of predicting
> what a user using the GNOME terminal will be doing.
> 
> If you are using the GNOME Terminal, which is the least of the
> end-user applications, the last thing you want to do is remove
> important functionality.

Suprisingly a huge percentage of bug reports we get at Red Hat are
about GNOME terminal -- "the least of the end-user applications"

Terminal windows should "just work", just as much as any other
application should just work.

There are several problems with the current interface:

 * No user is going to have the faintest clue what the config options
   actually do. By adding "Del generates delete/^H", we made the 
   search for random fooling around and trying to get things to
   work even bigger.

 * If you log in to a remote terminal and change it, you've screwed
   your local terminals. Yes, if you are clever enough, you probably
   can use terminal classes to get around this, but I've never had
   much luck with them. The interfaction between default settings,
   terminal classes and session-saved settings gets very confusing.

Regards,
                                        Owen

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