This topic seems to have taken on a life of its own. My apologies to people who aren't interesting in the history of deleting characters to the left.
On Mon, Jul 27, 2026 at 02:25 (+0200), Vincent Lefevre wrote: > On 2026-07-26 12:03:55 -0300, Jim via Mutt-dev wrote: >> On Sun, Jul 26, 2026 at 17:13 (+0300), Valentin Nechayev wrote: >>> First, donʼt blame Microsoft; this was IBM who pushed its style of >>> keyboard after XT/AT and AT-101 ones to standard, including such >>> previously impossible thing as Selectric placement of non-alphanumeric >>> keys. Microsoft was not strong enough yet in mis-1980s to make this. >> Fair comment. But I will say that before I saw my first IBM PC (with MS >> software on it) I had never seen a keyboard with "backspace" up in that >> corner of the keyboard. For example, the VT240, a very common terminal in its day had a Delete key (whose keycap sometimes said "Delete", and sometimes had a little icon on it) just above the return key, and that pressing that key sent the ASCII delete character. See https://www.nf6x.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/IMG_2839.jpg for a picture of a version of the keyboard with the icon rather than the word "Delete". >> (Well, with the possible exception of an APL terminal; as you may know, >> in APL backspace didn't delete, because there were some characters >> composed as <char 1><backspace><char 2>.) > IMHO, you are not talking about the usual BackSpace key here, Where are you referring to? I had talked about two things. In the first one, I was indeed talking about a physical key on a keyboard. In the second one, I was talking about whatever an IBM 2741 terminal did when you pressed the backspace key. What it didn't do in that situation was delete the character... it moved backward. > but about the ASCII (and now Unicode) backspace character, with code 8. > U+0008 BACKSPACE > not to be confused with > U+007F DELETE > At some point (possibly introduced by Microsoft), the BackSpace key > was sending the character of code 8 and the Delete key was sending > the character of code 127 (0x7f), and on such a system, the character > of code 8 was deleting backward and the the character of code 127 > was deleting forward. But later, this was assumed to be incorrect, > and nowadays, with most system configurations, the BackSpace key > sends the character of code 0x7f (which was originally the character > to delete backward) and the Delete key sends some special escape > sequence. Just to be clear, are you talking about current ("IBM") PC keyboards? > Apple keyboards only have a Delete key, whose effect is to delete > backward (like the BackSpace key on other keyboards): > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_keyboards > The naming is more consistent, but the absence of a key to delete > forward is less practical. I suppose that since the first systems I used a lot were structured in a way (admittedly that now looks primitive) where you almost always deleted backward, the idea of wanting to delete forward seems a bit peculiar. (For example, I just typed "peci" by mistake, and I suppose I could have used the arrow keys to go back before the erroneous "i", and then deleted forward, but it is a lot easier to just delete backward.) > With Xorg, the BackSpace key still sends the character of code 8 > and the Delete key sends the the character of code 0x7f, as given > by XLookupString (seen with xev, for instance). However, I suspect > that XLookupString is mostly ignored by the applications, in favor > of the keysym. On my system XLookupString gives the same character (for the backspace and delete keys) as listed for the keysym. >> On this particular laptop, there is a left-pointing arrow on the key which >> I use to delete backwards (so it isn't called anything, in the sense of >> having a word or abbreviation of a word on it). > It is typically called the backspace key: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace#Nomenclature Indeed. Much to my annoyance. ;-) It's a shame everyone flocked to the IBM PC instead of the DEC Rainbow (IIRC that was their personal computer model). >> Above that there is a much smaller key labelled "delete". > And this is the delete key. > BTW, I've found in my archives: > https://aterm.sourceforge.net/keyboard.html > "Consistent BackSpace and Delete Configuration" Thanks for that. I now see that the terminfo files for the terminals I use map the backspace key to DEL. I guess that has been happening for so long with no input from me that I forgot all about it. Jim
