Re: gnome-terminal delete/backspace mess



Owen Taylor wrote:

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.


I just looked at the preferences panel. I've been using xterms for over a decade and I couldn't make any sense out of them. Perhaps the real problem is the descriptions of the fields?

I have "Swap delete/backspace" checked, but my terminal is sending ^? when I hit the backspace, so they're really NOT switched! Confusion abounds. Does this mean that the normal (unchecked) behavior is to send ^H? Yep, it appears so. So the meaning of the checkbox is exactly opposite of the descriptive text.

And then there's an option "Delete generates DEL/^H" which I won't check because I can't figure out which one it means. If it's checked, does Delete "generate" DEL? Or does it generate ^H? Or will it send both? How can an either/or option be a checkbox?

What about one single option: "Send ^H for backspace (for older terminals)" -- and it only takes effect on the terminal you set it on.

robey






[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Thread Index] [Date Index] [Author Index]