On 2015-08-20 21:59, Dave Huang wrote:
On 8/20/2015 14:40, Johnny Billquist wrote:I would say that "stty erase ^H" is a suggestion on changing how NetBSD reacts to an ASCII BS character...Hmm, OK, I see what you mean... I wasn't thinking of it in that way (and erase is already set to ^H, so it's not really a change :)
Exactly! It by default (nowadays) is bound to ^H. Nothing has changed. If things suddenly stops working, and the op is seeing ^? echoed, something have changed on the "other" side, to make the system send DEL. Either correct the originating side to send BS again, or changed NetBSD to accept DEL for erase.
I'm actually surprised, since most people nowadays seems to actually want erase to be bound to BS, and I have found NetBSD to do that for me for the last 10 years or so. Personally I want to use DEL, and not BS. But I seem to be a very small minority nowadays. :-) And I usually have to set it that way myself, which is why I have a "stty dec" in my login scripts...Maybe most people nowadays aren't emacs users? :) I haven't tried having the Backspace key send ^H in a long time, because when I did do that, pressing Backspace in emacs would bring up help. Also, it seems that wscons on NetBSD/i386 sends ^? for Backspace. But I haven't had to think about what it sends in a long time, since ssh is supposed to preserve tty settings when connecting to another machine, and up until NetBSD 7.0, it's just worked seamlessly.
While Emacs is an example of an application wanting this behavior, I'm basically old enough, and accustomed enough to old DEC behavior (see stty dec), to always want that key to send DEL, especially since I still also use various DEC systems, which still require you to send DEL if you want to delete a character, and where BS do not have any general defined function. (It will usually just echo back, causing the terminal to move the cursor one step to the left, ie to a backspace.)
ssh itself do not translate characters, nor do it, as far as I can remember, actually "preserve" tty settings. It do pass along what terminal type you have, which termcap based applications use to figure out how your terminal works. I think wscons can be configured to send either. I have it set to emulate a VT100, so it *should* send DEL then, but I don't know if it actually do. Haven't checked, and don't have any system up at the moment. :-)
Johnny