[darcs-devel] [issue727] darcs does not understand backspace

[zooko]

On Mar 4, 2008, at 9:27 PM, Josh Wilcox wrote:
>
> New submission from Josh Wilcox <wilcoxjg at gmail.com>:
>
> Because darcs does not handle backspace in the expected way when I  
> find it
> almost impossible to add reasonable patch names.   This is extremely
> irritating.

There is a way to reconfigure your terminal which can fix this.  You  
can check whether your terminal is configured to send the right (??)  
signal when you hit backspace by doing:

cat > /dev/null

And then hitting [ENTER], and then typing something and then hitting  
backspace.  I'll bet that "cat" does the same thing that "darcs" does  
here -- shows you "^H" or some other weird character instead of  
backspacing.

So in one sense this is your problem -- you ought to reconfigure your  
terminal, but in another sense maybe it is darcs's problem -- darcs  
ought to handle terminals configured in the way yours is.  After all,  
bash is handling it correctly, since you can type "echo blah" and  
then backspace over the blah, and probably vim and most other apps  
that you use are handling it as well, leaving "cat" and "darcs" as  
the odd men out who insist on your reconfiguring your terminal to  
suit them.

Here's my litmus test: are darcs's competitors, hg for example, more  
flexible?  If your terminal is still in the state where "cat" and  
"darcs" emit "^H" instead of backspace, does hg also do?

Regards,

Zooko