henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (07/02/83)
A minor improvement has been made to the system: the behavior of the backspace character has been made smarter. Instead of just backspacing your terminal past the character it is erasing, it now actually blanks the character off the screen. Note, however, that it doesn't do this quite correctly for tabs, backslashes (\), and invisible characters -- the oddities involved in backspacing over them remain, although in a slightly different form. Printing terminals will behave a bit oddly, since they can't actually blank out a character once they have printed it, but the oddness should not be harmful and the net result on them will be the same as it was before: the erased character and the new one overprinted. If this behavior causes real trouble for anybody, arrangements can be made to turn it off for specific users. See David or me.