Re: Emacs reads both DEL and Backspace as DEL

[Greg Hill]

At 4:29 PM +0000 1/23/03, Ivan A. Uemlianin wrote:
> Dear All
>
> I'm running GNU emacs 20.7 on Debian GNU/Linux 3.0
>
> I'm just in the process of writin ga little ~/.emacs file.  I 
> haven't been able to find the system default init file (not in 
> /usr/share/emacs or /etc/default), but I wanted to have some 
> different settings.
>
> One change I wanted was to have the '<X|' key (Backspace?) as 
> delete-backward-char and 'Delete' (DEL) as delete-char.  However, my 
> emacs reads both of these keys as DEL (detectable with M-x 
> describe-key).
>
> Virtual consoles and other apps treat the keys differently, so I 
> know the issue is with emacs (and not eg the keyboard).
>
> Does anyone have any clues as to what's happening, and what I can do 
> to change it?

On my platform, (Unix, on a Sun, using eXodus on a MAC (OS-9) as my 
terminal), I have to put the following into my shell login script:

  xmodmap -e "keycode 188 = BackSpace"

I used a program called xev to find out what the keycode was (188) 
for the key that I wanted to use as BackSpace.  If I didn't use 
xmodmap to change it, it was assigned the same keysym, "Delete", as 
the key I use for delete-char, whose keycode is 48.

I also have the following in my .emacs:

  (global-set-key [delete] 'delete-char)

after which describe-key starts identifying that key (keycode = 48) 
as "delete" instead of "DEL", although it continues to identify the 
other 'delete' key (keycode=188) as "DEL".

I also tried globally binding [backspace] to 'delete-backward-char, 
after which describe-key started indentifying the  188-key as 
"backspace" instead of as "DEL".  But that had the undesirable 
side-effect of interfering with the automatic re-binding of that key 
for certain major modes; so I just don't rebind [backspace] and 
everything works the way I like.

Due to differences in our platforms, the details may be a bit 
different for you.  But perhaps this will help you figure out what 
you need to do.

Good luck.

--Greg