Backspace doesn't go back under screen.

October 16, 2008 5:31 AM

Can I make backspace work the same in a screen session as in a normal shell?

I'm rather fond of screen, but what I don't like is the way that backspace becomes delete - ie it deletes the character under the cursor, rather than the one to the left, and gives an annoying "wuff wuff" message if the cursor is at the end of the line.

Can this behaviour be adjusted to match the behaviour of the shell I started with?

(this is under various ubuntus and OpenWRT - OSX doesn't have this problem)

posted by pompomtom to computers & internet (2 comments total)

Try stty erase ^?. You may wind up putting that into your .profile or other auto-file.

I think that's a termcap setting, check here for more information.
posted by unixrat at 6:22 AM on October 16, 2008

If the problem is limited to within screen, look at either ~/.screenrc or /etc/screenrc.

Specifically, old debian defaults had a broken (ok, different) backspace keybinding which my notes so I removed with this line in the file.

bindkey -k kb

If you "man screen" you'll see all the default keybindings ....
posted by devbrain at 7:06 AM on October 16, 2008