Re: tmux messes up my backspace character

[Steffen Nurpmeso <sdaoden%yandex.com@localhost>]

Rhialto <rhialto%falu.nl@localhost> wrote:
 |> Can't you simply `bind-key' over that?
 |
 |I don't think so. bind-key looks to be for commands only, not a general
 |translation mechanism.

I now see tmux has also has a terminal-overrides.. oops, but mind
you, i still was registered to tmux-users@ once the thread you
have been pointed to was current, so i'm sorry i didn't remember
that.  But i have e.g. `bind a eval copy "stuff \002"' in my
.screenrc -- `stuff' is a very powerful tool, too.

 |> But i'm out of ideas if not; i switched back to screen(1) due to
 |> it's charset conversion capabilities (i'm still using ISO-8859-x
 |> on all BSD VMs),o
 |
 |Yes, so do I, and I noticed that if I happen to access my systems from
 |Linux, then tmux won't translate characters for use in utf8 terminals.

So with screen i can stay in a single session, with tmux
i couldn't: simply setting an UTF-8 flag on some window doesn't
help to deal with different character sets.  Though most is
english, German Umlauts can well be transformed, even round-trip.
I _really_ was surprised once i saw that this feature was missing,
my guess is that administrators still live in a heterogeneous
environment: all english.

 |> requires significantly less CPU time and after
 |
 |I am also surprised by the high cpu time usage of tmux. I wonder what it
 |is doing in all that time? The FAQ mentions something about automatic
 |window renaming or somesuch - I'm going to try turning that off and see
 |if that helps.

Worse, for 1.6 to compile on Snow Leopard i even had to adjust its
usage of `struct bsdinfo', if i recall correctly, so i even had to
blame myself?  Ok, sometimes i wish screen would always display
a status line with all currently open windows or at least had an
option to always display the current one so that there would be no
need to ^A-w (windows) or ^A-W (windowlist), but having one more
line is a great thing.

 |> And i guess your problem could be easily fixed with it's `term*' commands.
 |
 |I used screen before, and there the problem doesn't exist at all. It
 |took a while to discover it in tmux because many programs can use
 |whatever is set for the erase character, including bash. I noticed it in
 |mutt, where ^H scrolls back a single line in a mail message.
 |
 |I have also mailed to the tmux-users mailing list, and I have discovered
 |which code seems to be responsible for the translation:
 |
 |        /*
 |         * Check for backspace key using termios VERASE - the terminfo
 |         * kbs entry is extremely unreliable, so cannot be safely
 |         * used. termios should have a better idea.
 |         */
 |        bspace = tty->tio.c_cc[VERASE];
 |        if (bspace != _POSIX_VDISABLE && key == bspace)
 |                key = KEYC_BSPACE;
 |
 |in cvs/src/external/bsd/tmux/dist/tty-keys.c. Note that KEYC_BSPACE is
 |'\177' or ASCII DEL, not backspace.

So i hope for you that tmux(1) gets fixed (you wrote "which shows
to my mind a misunderstanding"), back in February the thread ended
with "anyway try running stty verase ^? in tmux", at least from
the developer side.  Now that i know it but am back to screen, all
i miss is `bind-key < set-window-option force-width 80' (and ditto
`> 0'), which was very nice to have when reviewing code, but i can
still use `wc -L'.

--steffen