[R] R and xterm

Prof Brian Ripley ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Wed Mar 28 16:08:17 CEST 2001


> From owner-r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch Wed Mar 28 14:35 BST 2001
> X-Authentication-Warning: localhost.localdomain: wsimpson owned process doing 
-bs
> Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2001 14:34:28 +0100 (BST)
> From: Bill Simpson <wsi at gcal.ac.uk>
> To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [R] R and xterm
> X-Status: 
> X-Keywords: 
> X-UID: 2631
> 
> On Wed, 28 Mar 2001, Ragnar Beer wrote:
> 
> > Howdy!
> > 
> > I have a problem that's similar to one discussed earlier on the list: 
> > When not in xterm all the backspace and cursor-movements and stuff 
> > are working well. Only when I start R in an xterm window backspace 
> > appears as ^H and so on. What can I do?

> It is well known that backspace and delete are in general screwed up under
> unix, especially under X, and that special efforts have to be made to get
> them  as Mac and windows interpret them: delete = delete to
> right, backspace=delete to left.

Eh?  At least on UNIX(R) systems they work well: I have never seen a
`screwed up' Solaris system, and ever since 1987 my systems have worked
that way.

> One reason is that many unix guys don't accept that the backspace and
> delete keys should have different behaviours. These two keys didn't exist
> before PCs, and so unix didn't deal with this issue in the early days.

Again, I have never seen this on a real UNIX.

> Anne Baretta wrote a nice page describing some fixes.
> Anne's page seems to be gone from the net; a copy is here:
> http://turquoise.cs.ucr.edu/keyboard2/keyboard.html
> 
> I will say that under RedHat version 6.2 and greater backspace and delete
> are OK in console and in xterm under X. Anne's ideas were incorporated

Um, that's a Linux system, not a UNIX one.

> into Debian as well. I don't know what unix you're using, you don't say. I
> know that the most recent version of FreeBSD has screwed up keys. If you
> are using linux, I would suggest you switch to a distribution with
> unbroken keys like RedHat or Debian. Else read Anne's page and do the
> fixes.

Well, let's not confuse the copies with the trademarked genuine article.

Quick hint: stty -sane often helps confused terminals.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._



More information about the R-help mailing list