Debian README for xterm package
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The xterm terminal type on a Debian system is an alias for xterm-debian.
This means that "xterm" and "xterm-debian" are interchangeable as values of
the $TERM environment variable in the shell. Since the xterm-debian type
is typically not found on non-Debian systems, xterm is used as the system
default.
The terminal description for xterm-debian differs from that of
xterm-xorg in exactly two respects:
1. kbs is defined as ^? (ASCII 127), not ^H (ASCII 8)
2. kdch1 is defined as the sequence: ^[ [ 3 ~ (no spaces, and ^[ is ASCII
27, a.k.a ESCAPE) instead of ^? (ASCII 127)
^[[3~ is the DEC VT220 escape sequence for the keypad delete key (not the
numeric keypad, the one with Page Up, Page Down, etc. on a PC keyboard).
DEC VT100's, the text terminal which xterm was designed to emulate, had no
keypad delete key. ^[[3~ is also what the Linux console terminal type
generates for the keypad delete key. Note that the terminal definitions
that a Debian system uses are in the ncurses-base and ncurses-term
packages, not in the xterm package itself, though the terminfo and termcap
files that Debian uses may be found in the xterm documentation directory,
/usr/share/doc/xterm. People interested in reading further to stock up
ammo for their backspace/delete and terminal type wars should consult Tom
Dickey's (current maintainer of the xterm source code) FAQ, available in
the file /usr/share/doc/xterm/xterm.faq.{html,gz} and the website
<http://vt100.net>.
The default keymappings for xterm are different than they are upstream to
comply with the Debian Keyboard Policy and make xterm's behavior more
consistent with the Linux virtual console (and therefore with the behavior
of DEC VT 220 terminals).
vim:set ai et sw=4 ts=4 tw=80:
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