Xref: utzoo comp.sources.bugs:923 comp.unix.wizards:8080
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From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.bugs,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: tset (BSD?)
Message-ID: <4493@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 27 Apr 88 04:43:58 GMT
References: <8776@sol.ARPA>
Organization: Grasshopper Group in San Francisco
Lines: 20

ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap) wrote:
> Not a bug really, but I wish tset would accept both DEL and BS as erase
> for answering terminal type queries.

Stanford actually implemented two erase characters in the Unix tty
driver.  I think this is a great idea.  You can set it so that both BS
and DEL will erase a character, in all programs, not just those that
have been jiggered like Ken proposes for "tset".  For some reason,
people at Berkeley and Sun did not like this change and it is still a
local Stanford thing.

Maybe with streams tty drivers even we binary customers will be able
to write a little module that will support a second erase character
and push it onto the stream...until we finish GNU and have full source.

The tty support in any OS is such a mass of dealing-with-idiosyncracies
that I'm surprised that people want the humans, rather than the computers,
to keep having to deal with the BS versus DEL idiosyncracy.
-- 
John Gilmore  {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu        gnu@toad.com
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