@b0rk @simontatham @mjd In the 90s I got frustrated with this and wrote up how backspace and delete ought to work in terminals. The result survives in Debian Policy [www.debian.org]. Following that spec is the only way to make everything work properly.
When I wrote that spec, systems were often broken, so it's not like ^H for <--
was the "old standard". Glass ttys generally had a thing in the settings to control what the <--
key generated.