Tips of the Day

It's just a backspace

Is it too much to ask for backspace to mean backwards-delete? Apparently it is, because there are entire bug threads and forum posts dedicated to the issue. I finally got mine working with the following in my .screenrc:

bindkey -d ^? stuff ^H

Thanks to this blog post. The original post also maps ^@, but that conflicts with ctrl-space set-mark in emacs. It also appears to be working for me without that second line.

The other solution that made backspace work was

alias screen='TERM=screen screen'

But this solution screwed up the status bar colors on the bottom of my screen.

Something that was somewhat useful in helping debug this problem was figuring out what backspace actually mapped to in Terminal, in a ssh shell, and in screen. To display a non-printing character, start with ^v (control-v), then type the non-printing letter (backspace). What I got were:

Terminal: ^?
SSH:      ^?
screen:   ^[[3~

It's amazing how many mappings people suggested in the forums, and how all of them didn't work. My guess is that YMMV and you just need to try all of them until you get one that works. Here's some others I tried:

bindkey -k kb stuff "10"
bindkey -k kb stuff "77"

And other variations with ^?, ^H, and ^[[3~.

jQuery Tooltips

I ended up choosing mbTooltips for this specific application because it's relatively lightweight (4k minified, with 8k of dependencies). The original jTips plugin that was in use was a whopping 187k AND used AJAX requests to get tooltip data. jTips is also unmaintained. Personally, I would just use the default 'title' attribute on HTML elements for tooltips, and style them appropriately.

Django Stuff

To do redirects:

# You'd think redirects wouldn't need to be explicitly imported...
from django.http import HttpResponseRedirect
return HttpResponseRedirect("/")

Form models, form helpers, form processing