Another what the heck moment in Fedora 43. In Gnome-terminal (only, not xterm), hitting 'Delete' in vim insert mode no longer deletes characters to the left of the cursor, only characters to the right. Delete is generating ^? in both gnome-terminal and xterm, and Delete works to delete characters in vim in g-t on the ':' command prompt.
Whatever vim / gnome-terminal combined stupidity this is, I want it gone. Now.
Well I have an answer to my vim and gnome-terminal thing and the answer is 'set noxtermcodes'. The other answer is that both gnome-terminal and vim have what I think are bugs that collude to allow this situation to happen. You can argue about exactly whose fault this was, but that's not really productive.
Well I guess there is a workaround in gnome-terminal by changing what it generates for 'Delete' (the key) to 'escape sequence'. What a mess.
@cks shouldn’t backspace send ^H and delete send ^?
what does stty say about the keys / characters?
@drscriptt One of the charming things about this issue is that stty is relatively irrelevant because vim plucks the key settings out of your terminal emulator. (Well, there is no stty for forward-delete, so one can't entirely blame vim.)
Modern standard X and Wayland behavior is that the physical BackSpace key generates ASCII DEL and the Delete key generates something else, typically an escape sequence rather than Ctrl-H.
Chris Siebenmann
DrScriptt