Vakkotaur

Ultima Linux has a tolerable terminal text editor, jed. Or so I'd thought. Maybe it was something I did (and by mistake, for I would never intentionally cause this breakage) as I recall I could use the backspace key and it did what I expected: deleted the previous character and moved the cursor back a character. Nice, sane, sensible. Today I went to edit something and found jed instead saw CONTROL-H and rather than doing something sane (acting like a proper backspace, or even just moving the cursor back a character without deletion) it brought up some help lines and changed context on me. That's an EMACS thing. It gets in my way. Modal editors suck[1] (Okkay, so technically emacs is non-modal. It still sucks in its own special way). And even with a (non)modal editor, what kind an incompetent assigns CONTROL-H to help? CONTROL-H for Help makes sense, except that CONTROL-H is universally a 'go back one character' command or would be if EMACS and things stupidly copying it didn't break the standard.

I think I'll get a bit more serious about getting joe to install on Ultima. At least joe doesn't pull this modal crap. I don't need context switching land mines getting in my way.

There is a work-around that works in the Eterm terminal emulator. It is to issue stty erase ^H and to make it so one doesn't need to do it manually all the time, add it to /etc/profile .

[1] Yes, I know vi is modal. It also sucks. It just sucks less due to being an editor rather than a Swiss Army Planet of a program that occasionally masquerades as an editor. Also, as vi is almost universally present, it can be used to render a system working enough to get a proper non-modal editor.