Suggestion for terminal package maintainers

[Andy Koppe]

Corinna Vinschen:
> What makes me a bit concerned about this change is that, while we can
> change Cygwin's terminfo and termcap files, we can't do that for
> existing non-Cygwin installations.  Is it really safe to change the BS
> key to ^? now that the "cygwin" terminal type is known to return ^H for
> so many years?

No, not entirely, but most apps seem to either accept both ^? and ^H
as backspace anyway, or do things the proper way and look up the erase
character via tcgetattr() rather than terminfo. I use ^? in MinTTY and
haven't come across any backspace problems, even though that's at odds
with the TERM==xterm terminfo entry. (The default in MinTTY still is
^H.)

Andy