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From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@elta.co.il>
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Subject: Re: inconsistent bindings of backspace and delete between X and
	xterm
Date: 11 Feb 2004 08:57:26 +0200
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> From: Dale Hagglund <rdh@yottayotta.com>
> Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2004 17:13:53 -0700
> 
> >> This is wrong: the <delete> key should not be mapped to DEL.  It
> >> should be mapped to C-d, and thus run `delete-char', like it does
> >> in xterm.
> 
> [In the original email I provided some more details about my setup
> here.]
> 
> Do you have any thoughts on why I might be getting incorrect default
> behaviour?  Where might I look to try to track down what's going on?

The value of normal-erase-is-backspace is the place to start: if your
system has both a Backspace key and a Delete key, Emacs should have
set normal-erase-is-backspace to t.  This setting happens in
startup.el: Emacs invokes the function x-backup-delete-keys-p, and if
it returns non-nil, assumes both Backspace and Delete keys exist and
are bound to their usual meanings.

The function x-backup-delete-keys-p (defined on xfns.c) needs the XKB
extension of the X libraries to do its work; if your system doesn't
support XKB, that could be the reason why the above automagic doesn't
work.

I hope the information above gives you enough to start tracing what
happens on your system during startup and see why Emacs doesn't DTRT.