Re: x5250 destructive backspace?

On Mon, 25 Jan 2010, Evan List wrote:

I've been using the wonderful x5250 5250 emulator made by James Rich.  It does nearly everything we need from an emulator.

Thank you for saying so :)

Some of my new users have been asking for a destructive backspace (where the backspace key will delete the character as well as move the cursor back on space). 

I found the posting of someone else asking for this on tn5250.  Using those instructions I edited the source of tn5250 and compiled successfully, and destructive backspace works in tn5250!  I then compiled x5250-0.5.2-pre4 against that.  Sadly x5250 seems to have its own change needed.  While it compiles and executes fine, it still does not backspace and delete the character.

Does anyone know if there is a source change or even a command line flag that could enable this?

There isn't currently an option to enable destructive backspace. It wasn't a priority since real 5250 terminals don't have it. However, there's no reason why it couldn't be enabled. This will require a source code change. The code should probably look for an option called +destructivebackspace or something like that in ~/.tn5250rc. Can you point me to the instructions you found for destructive backspace intn5250?

James Rich

if you want to understand why that is, there are many good books on
the design of operating systems. please pass them along to redmond
when you're done reading them :)
- Paul Davis on ardour-dev