backspace => ^? in remote vi under screen, all shells zsh

backspace => ^? in remote vi under screen, all shells zsh

[Deliverable Mail]

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I have this annoying problem -- in my local zsh and screen everything is
OK.  But when I log into certain Red Hat 7.2 boxen from a window in that
screen, and start vi, backspace produces ^?.  Note that *remote* shell is
zsh and backspace in its command line works just fine.

I dug out the solution for (the local) screen -- tell it

bindkey ^? stuff ^H

That fixes the remote vi, keeps remote zsh happy, but breaks the local
screen itself fscking up ^A <backspace> which no longer moves to the
previous window until it eats an extra key press or something.

I wonder whether this is a problem which can be fixed on zsh's own bindkey
level?

Cheers,
Alexy

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Re: backspace => ^? in remote vi under screen, all shells zsh

[Bart Schaefer]

On Feb 10,  5:45pm, Deliverable Mail wrote:
} 
} I have this annoying problem -- in my local zsh and screen everything is
} OK.  But when I log into certain Red Hat 7.2 boxen from a window in that
} screen, and start vi, backspace produces ^?.

The trouble here is that all applications on both ends of the remote shell
connection have to agree on (a) what key value produces the effect of
"erase the character left of the cursor" and (b) what key value is sent
by the backspace key.

At some point during the RH6.x series, the default for the backspace key
was switched (I don't recall in which direction ... I think from ^H to
^? but I may be wrong).  This is a low-level setting, in the console
driver if you're not using X11 or the X key bindings if you are, and is
not controllable by the shell's key binding mechanism.

} Note that *remote* shell is
} zsh and backspace in its command line works just fine.

That's because zsh treats ^? and ^H as interchangable unless you have
explicitly bindkey'd it otherwise.  "Real" vi also used to do so, but
vim (the open-source vi clone favored by RH) does not.

} I wonder whether this is a problem which can be fixed on zsh's own
} bindkey level?

You *might* be able to fix it by fooling around with "stty erase" on the
remote and/or local system, but exactly what you need to do depends on
which system is remote and which is local and might change for any given
pairing.

Re: backspace => ^? in remote vi under screen, all shells zsh

[Thor Andreassen]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 05:45:18PM -0800, Deliverable Mail wrote:
[...]
> I wonder whether this is a problem which can be fixed on zsh's own bindkey
> level?

I put this in my zshrc, when I encountered a similar problem:

bindkey "^?" backward-delete-char

-- 
Thor Andreassen