how to backspace in vi 2550

It is one of the major Linux idiocies, but not one that will be solved soon. emacs way way back in the dark ages of computing decided to use ^H for backspace because it was run on a DEC terminal and thus used ^? for backspace. At around the same time the ASCII key encoding was formalised ( in opposition to EBSIDEC of IBM) which defines ^H as backspace. Now these poor babies were discombobulated beacuse they could not live without vi and could not redefine their help. So over the years a small idiotic group decided to keep using ^? from those obsolete DEC terminals as backspace, despite the fact that the PC used ^H They have managed to have their way think that their captor is good.

Anyway, having presented that somewhat biased account, vi, and many many input routines in Linux, natively use ^H as backspace. So One way out is to type in ^H (control H) instead of the backspace key in vi. That is of course a real pain. So the other answer is to put lines like set tkb=^? into .vimrc in your home directory ( or try some combination of those) which tells vi to use ^? as backspace, and fix up the delete key.

Note that this will not fix backspace for a number of programs which roll their own input routines. For those the onlyanswer when you see the dreaded ^? is to use the control-H for backspace.

It is a battle that is long lost, but the corpses will continue to litter the computing battlefield for centuries to come.