The whole backspace/delete/C-h thing in Unix is always a pain. Having a backspace or delete key that invokes help is one of the most frustrating things. And not having C-h bound to emacs excellent help is pretty annoying too.

And every time I read explanations about keycodes and terminal crap, my eyes glaze over and I get confused.

I had everything working great in my X11 emacsen, but I was having problems with my emacsen in xterms.

Well through a bit of trial and error, I found settings that seem to do the trick for me.

In ~/.Xdefaults:

XTerm*backarrowKey: false

In ~/.bashrc:

stty erase '^?'

Something is wrong. This feels too easy…