Terminal Standard

[Hans de Goede]

Benjamin Bruheim wrote:
>>> We all know the problems with keytabs and terminal issues. Every piece
>>  > of software works around it. But are there any attempts at making a
>>  > proper standard on terminals? Every trail I've looked at has been
>>  > dead.
>>  >
>>  > Most terminals provide their own $TERM, but it is about time the
>>  > myriad of terminals decide on the Right Way.
>>
>>  Would this be a better topic for freestandards.org?
> 
> Currently I don't see them having any topics on it. And there has been
> attempts at uniting terminals before, but it has never had any force
> behind it.
> 
> Distributions select their primary terminal. But this leads to
> software across distros not being compatible with the standard layout,
> so I do think this is a distribution issue.
> 

There is a stanard, its called xterm and most other terminal emulators 
(gnome-terminal, konsole) mimick it.

The only issue is the backspace key which with the original xterm gets mapped 
to CTRL-H, but that has issues (mostly emacs users whining CTRL-H should be 
help) so most distro's use an xresource setting to make xterm emit ASCII-DEL 
(\177) for the backspace key, and patch termcap/terminfo to match. Notice that 
backspace sends ASCII-DEL is the default for gnome-terminal / konsole.

I really don't understand why this issue is being raised here. This used to be 
a problem back in 96-98, then I wrote countless howto's and bugreports around 
it and now everything is standardized on xterm, with backspace mapped to ASCII-DEL.

Regards,

Hans