Subject: bug#78474: 31.0.50; Wrong char insertion in rxvt

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2025 14:54:27 +0300

> Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2025 18:03:47 +0200
> From: Samuel Thibault <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked],
> 	[email-masked]
> 
> Eli Zaretskii, le lun. 21 juil. 2025 18:58:06 +0300, a ecrit:
> > > > > That does not exist in terminals, only in graphical sessions
> > > > 
> > > > How come?  Screen readers should announce themselves quite prominently
> > > > to any system, so I'd be very surprised to hear that they are
> > > > invisible on Linux terminals.
> > > 
> > > They really are, since they just read the content from /dev/vcsa.
> > 
> > OK, but the reader itself is a program that is loaded into memory,
> > right?  Can those programs be detected somehow?  Do they leave some
> > traces somewhere on the system?  E.g., if those programs have known
> > names, we could scan the processes running on the system and look for
> > them, if no better method exists.
> 
> Do you allow me to puke?

You can, but it will hardly be useful.

And frankly, I don't understand the attitude.  The original request
was to have an option to disable use of TABs for moving the cursor,
see

  https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=78474#29

Adding such an option is a relatively easy decision, and a preliminary
patch was already posted here to that effect.

But now you have changed the request, and are asking to disable the
TABs by default.  That is a much harder decision to make, since the
relevant code is working for us for decades, and disabling TABs will
definitely slow down display on text-mode terminals, especially those
connected via slow-speed connections.  So I'm trying hard to find some
way of determining that the user could be using screen reading
software, or some other accessibility features of the OS, to
automatically disable TABs only in those cases.  (We do something
similar with system caret on MS-Windows, another accessibility feature
related to screen readers.)  IOW, I'm trying to find a way to allow us
to disable TABs in those cases where that matters, instead of asking
the affected users to do that manually.  Why this should cause the
above reaction is beyond me.