Re: [PATCH] Change <delete> to delete forward in the editor menu.

This topic seems to have taken on a life of its own.  My apologies to
people who aren't interesting in the history of deleting characters to the
left.

On Mon, Jul 27, 2026 at 02:25 (+0200), Vincent Lefevre wrote:

> On 2026-07-26 12:03:55 -0300, Jim via Mutt-dev wrote:
>> On Sun, Jul 26, 2026 at 17:13 (+0300), Valentin Nechayev wrote:
>>> First, donʼt blame Microsoft; this was IBM who pushed its style of
>>> keyboard after XT/AT and AT-101 ones to standard, including such
>>> previously impossible thing as Selectric placement of non-alphanumeric
>>> keys. Microsoft was not strong enough yet in mis-1980s to make this.

>> Fair comment.  But I will say that before I saw my first IBM PC (with MS
>> software on it) I had never seen a keyboard with "backspace" up in that
>> corner of the keyboard.

For example, the VT240, a very common terminal in its day had a Delete key
(whose keycap sometimes said "Delete", and sometimes had a little icon on it)
just above the return key, and that pressing that key sent the ASCII delete
character.

See https://www.nf6x.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/IMG_2839.jpg for a
picture of a version of the keyboard with the icon rather than the word
"Delete".


>> (Well, with the possible exception of an APL terminal; as you may know,
>> in APL backspace didn't delete, because there were some characters
>> composed as <char 1><backspace><char 2>.)

> IMHO, you are not talking about the usual BackSpace key here,

Where are you referring to?  I had talked about two things.

In the first one, I was indeed talking about a physical key on a keyboard.

In the second one, I was talking about whatever an IBM 2741 terminal did
when you pressed the backspace key.  What it didn't do in that situation
was delete the character... it moved backward.

> but about the ASCII (and now Unicode) backspace character, with code 8.

> U+0008 BACKSPACE

> not to be confused with

> U+007F DELETE



> At some point (possibly introduced by Microsoft), the BackSpace key
> was sending the character of code 8 and the Delete key was sending
> the character of code 127 (0x7f), and on such a system, the character
> of code 8 was deleting backward and the the character of code 127
> was deleting forward.  But later, this was assumed to be incorrect,
> and nowadays, with most system configurations, the BackSpace key
> sends the character of code 0x7f (which was originally the character
> to delete backward) and the Delete key sends some special escape
> sequence.

Just to be clear, are you talking about current ("IBM") PC keyboards?


> Apple keyboards only have a Delete key, whose effect is to delete
> backward (like the BackSpace key on other keyboards):

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_keyboards

> The naming is more consistent, but the absence of a key to delete
> forward is less practical.

I suppose that since the first systems I used a lot were structured
in a way (admittedly that now looks primitive) where you almost always
deleted backward, the idea of wanting to delete forward seems a bit
peculiar.  (For example, I just typed "peci" by mistake, and I suppose I
could have used the arrow keys to go back before the erroneous "i", and
then deleted forward, but it is a lot easier to just delete backward.)

> With Xorg, the BackSpace key still sends the character of code 8
> and the Delete key sends the the character of code 0x7f, as given
> by XLookupString (seen with xev, for instance).  However, I suspect
> that XLookupString is mostly ignored by the applications, in favor
> of the keysym.

On my system XLookupString gives the same character (for the backspace and
delete keys) as listed for the keysym.


>> On this particular laptop, there is a left-pointing arrow on the key which
>> I use to delete backwards (so it isn't called anything, in the sense of
>> having a word or abbreviation of a word on it).

> It is typically called the backspace key:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace#Nomenclature

Indeed.  Much to my annoyance.  ;-)

It's a shame everyone flocked to the IBM PC instead of the DEC Rainbow
(IIRC that was their personal computer model).

>> Above that there is a much smaller key labelled "delete".

> And this is the delete key.

> BTW, I've found in my archives:

> https://aterm.sourceforge.net/keyboard.html
>   "Consistent BackSpace and Delete Configuration"

Thanks for that.  I now see that the terminfo files for the terminals I use
map the backspace key to DEL.  I guess that has been happening for so long
with no input from me that I forgot all about it.


                                Jim