[ANNOUNCEMENT] Updated: mintty-0.5.1-1

[Warren Young]

Andy Koppe wrote:
> 2009/10/16 Eric Backus:
>> Unfortunately, cygwin's terminfo/termcap entries for XTERM say that the
>> backspace key returns ^H.  
> 
> xterm does still send ^H, but I agree both xterm and its termcap entry
> ought to be changed to match the new Cygwin 1.7 default and the Linux
> world. I should have a look at how to do that.

Well, on Linux consoles, the term type is "linux".  Presumably this is 
one of the reasons they felt they needed a separate term type.

Maybe MinTTY should be emulating something other than xterm, which 
doesn't have this backspace problem?  I don't mean something vastly 
different, just something else in the ANSI/VT100 zoo.

> Have you come across an application that stumbles over this? 

Obviously you're responding to some user reported bug, so here's a 
better question: how does Emacs handle C-h on Linux under xterm?  If it 
works fine, you should try to find out how xterm manages that.

> All the
> one's I've tried seemed to go by the stty setting rather than the
> termcap entry anyway.

This is a problem I still see on Linux today.  Programs that accept user 
input via standard C mechanisms (rather than something intelligent like 
ncurses) often don't deal with regular backspaces.  So, test with things 
like ftp or ex.  Or, write a simple test program that uses gets() or 
similar.  If that handles backspace correctly, that's a high endorsement 
for doing it the way you are already.

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