Thanks go to Knut Hellebo for his suggestion to use the -tm option on
xterm. But in fact I had a bright idea and a lucky guess after I sent the
message and that solved my first problem. No answer to the second problem
though...I guess it needs someone with access to the Tru64 source.
The strings command on xterm (TRU64 4.0E pk2) shows that there is an
undocumented resource BackspaceIsDelete doing exactly what I wanted to
solve the backspace problem. So I put
XTerm*BackspaceIsDelete: true
in a site resource file. This makes xterm behave on X terminals the way it
already does on the console (why the difference, Compaq?).
In my view the backspace/delete problem is one of the hardest things in
system administration to solve. It is comparatively easy to do if you have
a uniform environment, but if you have a variety of different terminals
then it is almost impossible to configure it in one place without breaking
something else.
I think my alternative strategy would be to use stty to accept cntrl-h as
the erase character, and configure emacs not to interpret c-h as help (the
emacs FAQ shows you how to do this). But I would then have the problem of
getting xterm to behave right on the Alpha console.
Bob
Original message:
>
> There are some very useful xterm configurations which can be performed via
> mouseclicks, but I haven't found any way of doing them via X resources or
> the command line.
>
> For example if you hit
> cntrl - middle mouse button
> you can select the 'Backspace sends delete' option from the resulting
> menu. This is pretty essential if you ever use line-mode emacs.
>
> Bizarrely, this option is set by default if you login at the console, but
> not if you login at an X terminal. How can I change the default for all
> our users?
>
> Likewise it would be very useful if you could select medium or large font
> as default (this is the cntrl-right button menu). This would be much more
> convenient than hard-coding a particular font in your X resource file (not
> necessarily available on all X servers).
>
> I know there are other ways of configuring backspace and delete (stty,
> xmodmap, Motif bindings), but I don't want to perturb the things which
> already work correctly.
>
==============================================================
Bob Vickers R.Vickers_at_dcs.rhbnc.ac.uk
Dept of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London
WWW:
http://www.cs.rhbnc.ac.uk/home/bobv
Phone: +44 1784 443691
Received on Tue Oct 19 1999 - 09:54:44 NZDT