>>> Actually, this holy war can be bypassed, without sacrificing Emacs >>> correctly working on a console. What the console should send for that >>> is the <Backspace> function key. >> >> Makes sense to me. Andy, is there any reason all cygwin terminals shouldn't >> do this (including mintty)? This already happens under X, and users would >> then have consistent behavior. > > What is the "<Backspace> function key", i.e. what character sequence > does that correspond to?
I've had a look at the emacs source. The Windows console variant of emacs uses low-level console I/O, namely the ReadConsoleInput() function. This delivers a stream of so-called input events, rather than a stream of characters like the high-level console functions. Also see here for the distinction: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms683497(VS.85).aspx One type of input event is a key event, which tells you exactly what key was pressed and which modifiers are down. Emacs translates that directly into its internal keyboard representation such as <Backspace>, thereby indeed bypassing the whole question of how keys should be represented in a character stream. Unix terminals are character devices though, sp terminal emulators have to encode keyboard events as sequences of characters, as that's what terminal applications expect to get. The terminal version of emacs then translates those into its internal representation. Now of course if emacs can translate low-level console I/O as it sees fit, then the Cygwin DLL could also be able to translate Backspace into ^? characters rather than ^H, in CYGWIN=tty mode anyway. So I had a look at fhandler_console.cc. It already uses ReadConsoleInput(), so mapping from VK_BACK to ^? might be fairly straightforward actually. I guess Cygwin 1.7 will be the last chance for quite a while to make such a change, so is this something that should be considered? A bit of googling tells me that Redhat Linux actually decided to follow the Debian guidelines many years ago and used ^? ever since, apart from a little wobble in Fedora Core 3. Andy -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
