Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 10648
backspace/delete issues with emacs under X
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:55 EDT
Package: emacs-20.5-7 File: /usr/share/emacs/20.5/lisp/term/x-win.elc Under X, both backspace and delete are mapped to keycode 127. Hence, both will delete the character immediately before the cursor. This is the expected behavior for backspace, but for delete, it should delete the character in front of the cursor. The solution is to change the file from: ... [backspace] [127] [delete] [127] [tab] [9] ... to: ... [backspace] [127] [delete] [deletechar] [tab] [9] ... This is on line 44 of the file. (I believe that this is not the original source for this file, so the proper fix is to change it elsewhere and regenerate this file)
No need to do that - just add this (global-set-key [delete] 'delete-char) to your .emacs. I think I'll add it to the global one, too.
Actually, we already do that in the default $HOME/.emacs in 6.2
I wouldn't rely on the configuation of ~/.emacs; it isn't always set up by Red Hat (or even any Linux distribution for that matter). In my case, user directories are NFS mounted, based on a Solaris setup. This is probably not terribly unusual in the corporate world. As long as it works with any ~/.emacs (or even with no ~/.emacs), then there's no problem (regardless of which of the Eighty Million Alternate Configuration Strategies you choose).