[screen-devel] erase == undef, terminals send ^@ for backspace

[Micah Cowan]

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So, I recently uncovered the source of a problem I'd seen about a year
ago, and which was recently reported again to me on IRC: when screen is
running under xfce4-terminal (or, apparently, compiz'
TerminalScreenlet), hitting backspace results in ^@ being sent, rather
than (say) ^? or ^H. This happens when xfce4-terminal's preferences are
set to "auto-detect" the correct control to send for backspace (it
simply uses the value from termios' c_cc[VERASE]); recent versions of
screen disable it by setting it to _POSIX_VDISABLE.

I'm preparing a patch to solve that in vte, but I was curious as to why
we need to do this? Older versions of screen did not do this, at least
for erase (according to git's logs, the change happened between 3.5.2
and 3.6.2). I'm somewhat inclined to undo that change, to avoid the
xfce4-terminal glitch; is there a compelling reason not to?

- --
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer,
and GNU Wget Project Maintainer.
http://micah.cowan.name/
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