On Monday, September 10 at 02:33 PM, quoth Mutt:
This still seems like a bug to me: mutt should be doing something more useful than asking terminfo what the default backspace character for the $TERM is. Besides the fact that it can be configured to be non-default, as you say, some of these terminal definitions are a little buggy. There is a more reliable way to do it, so mutt should use that (imho).But you don't really know if backspace is the same as erase...
Of course you don't know for certain---if there was a way to know for certain, then every application would use it. But consider for a moment what most (knowledgeable) folks would do if their terminal is emitting something as backspace that doesn't match the current erase character: either reconfigure their terminal to emit the expected erase character OR use stty to set what the erase character is.
Besides, the default erase character is pulled from terminfo just the same as mutt does. The problem is that with stty you can correct that for most applications if the default is wrong, and yet mutt will ignore whatever corrections the user makes.
But let's phrase this another way: what do you expect a user to do whose TERM entry is wrong? Edit the terminfo files? Figure out how to configure their terminal to match the broken terminfo files? Use stty to change the terminal settings to match the terminal? All of these are valid options, and *should* all work (and DO all work with most other terminal applications, such as vim, emacs, libreadline, etc.), but only the first two work with mutt. That seems broken to me.
~Kyle --Mathematicians stand on each other's shoulders while computer scientists stand on each other's toes.
-- R. W. Hamming
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