DELETE/BACKSPACE key paradox on RS/6000

[johnbob at there.austin.ibm.com]

This is the best description of the problem that I have seen:

In article <1991Mar14.173058.16978 at cs.utk.edu> jxt at cpdws1.ctd.ornl.gov (Tolliver J S) writes:
>Hi!
>This is being cross-posted to comp.unix.questions. First a small introduction.
>
>A few weeks ago, I started a flurry of comments about the
>delete/backspace keys and
...
>The problem is that the key marked delete on my keyboard is in the convenient
>location for (all-to-frequent) use and that getting to the backspace key is
>cumbersome. So why not just remap the delete key to send BACKSPACE? Well, I
On my keyboard it is the other way around.   The backspace key is easy to
get to and the delete key is inconvenient.

>cumbersome. So why not just remap the delete key to send BACKSPACE? Well, I
>use the same keyboard and terminal emulator to connect to a variety of
>machines, most of which use DELETE for the erase function. Here's a list:
>
>erase is DELETE		erase is BACKSPACE
>---------------		------------------
>Dec Ultrix		IBM AIX 3.1
>SUN			Silicon Graphics IRIS
>Intel Hypercube
>Apple AU/X
>NeXT
>Cray UNICOS
>Cray CTSS
>VAX/VMS
>DEC TOPS-10
>
I don't have all these other machines to look at so I'll just give a 
suggestion.  I can't test to see that it will work on all the machines
listed.

>...
>seems that the key-mapping gets done at some lower level even before .login
>...
>--
>Many thanks,
>Johnny Tolliver (jxt at ornl.gov)

In the directory "/usr/lib/nls/im/En_US" you may find a file "imkeymap.us".
(do this as root)
I looked through it and found lines that started with "0xff08" and "0xffff"
(line 266 and line 370).  I replaced the contents of line "0xffff" with the
contents of line "0xff08".  Here is what it looked like:

#0xffff "\033[P"    "\033[P"    "\033[P"	   "\033[P"    "\033[142q" U U U "\033[M"    U U U U U U U U
0xffff "\10" "\10"    "\10"    "\10" "\177"	 U U U "\033[071q" U U U U U U U U

I saved the file and ran these commands (as root):

 mv imkeymap imkeymap.orig
 keycomp < imkeymap.us > imkeymap

I started up an aixterm and both backspace and delete would delete characters.
You may also have to do the same thing for the keymap file "imkeymap.vt" in
directory "/usr/lib/nls/im/En_US.ascii".

As I said before, I have no way to test it.
Disclaimers apply.

Have a day.

-john harvey

john harvey
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