<<< Date Index >>>     <<< Thread Index >>>

Re: problem with backspace key in xterm-256color

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Sunday, June 15 at 05:11 PM, quoth Marianne Promberger:
> I'm running mutt in xfce4-terminal, which supports 256 colors, but I 
> have to manually set xfce4-terminal in its preferences dialogue to 
> identify as "xterm-256color" for mutt to display my 256-color colors. 
> So far, so good.

Hrmf. The XFCE folks *really* ought to provide their own termcap file. 
Telling your applications to pretend that it's a different terminal 
(e.g. an xterm) is practically guaranteed to get you incorrect 
behavior in some respect.

> Now I've noticed that with TERM=xterm-256color, mutt doesn't 
> recognize the backspace key in the index or the pager (I have 
> bindings for <backspace> in the .muttrc, but it says "key not 
> bound"). When I set TERM to "xterm", the backspace key works fine.

Interesting... does the terminal actually alter what it emits? In 
other words, when you press control-V backspace, what shows up in your 
shell, and does what shows up change based on the TERM setting? If 
not, is your termcap perhaps different? Try these two commands:

     infocmp -1 -L xterm | grep key_backspace
     infocmp -1 -L xterm-256color | grep key_backspace

They *should* be the same, but if they're not on your system, that 
would explain your problem (both should print out 
"key_backspace=^H,").

> In the "Advanced" tab of my xfce4-terminal settings, I have a 
> setting for "backspace key generates ..." with the options - 
> Auto-detect - ASCII DEL - Escape Sequence - Control-H

Uy. I wonder what "auto-detect" is actually doing.

> Only if I set this to "Control-H" does mutt recognize the backspace 
> key while TERM is set to xterm-256color.

Which suggests that the auto-detection isn't actually working very 
well.

> However, in that case, my editor (jed) doesn't recognize the 
> backspace anymore as such,

That suggests that jed is using different terminal libraries than 
mutt. I bet you can get them to agree on the backspace character by 
simply ensuring that both of them use the same terminal libraries. If 
memory serves, jed requires slang---since mutt can be compiled with 
slang (the default is ncurses), try that.

> Googling, I just found this long thread:
> http://bugs.mutt.org/trac/ticket/2952 
> but if there were practical solutions therein I failed to grasp them.

Just as there are several different bits and bobs of software that 
have to agree on these conventions (such as which byte is emitted for 
a backspace), there are several different ways to solve a problem when 
they disagree.

~Kyle
- -- 
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
                                                       -- Pablo Picasso
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Comment: Thank you for using encryption!

iEYEARECAAYFAkhVj8YACgkQBkIOoMqOI17gPACfcfHq+baKh2wI7uQ22LsNFufC
2Y0An0qi+8cQjKOSoXxOz31NJUI9wfam
=EMRO
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----