I have an issue trying to use backspace when entering text. I'm on OSX. When I press it, a triangle type character appears. I found a discussion on this in the d15 thread with a suggested fix, but that didn't seem to work for me.
By triangle type character you mean ⌂? This is the "delete" character (usually written as ^?). Some terminals send it instead of the backspace character (^H). You probably should adjust your terminal to use the correct backspace character. I don't know how to do that on OS X though. You could try 'stty', if it exists. Otherwise, a workaround should be to use ctrl-H as backspace.
@Baughn: Perhaps you can treat ^? as the same keybinding as ^H, since these are both used... (Edit:) Note that ^? is character 127.
It's based on the terminal emulator used. Different terminal types (xterm vs. vt100 vs. vt102 vs. wyse vs. screen vs. cons25 vs. ansi) use different characters. The two most common characters used are Control-H (0x08, e.g. ^H) and Control-? (0x7F, e.g. ^?). ^H is officially referred to as "Backspace", while ^? is officially referred to as "Delete" (less commonly referred to as a "destructive backspace").
Using stty to adjust this setting
is not recommended. People end up putting this into their dotfiles to "solve the problem" (which will flat out break things if you connect to the machine using another terminal type).
In the ncurses world, the character-to-behaviour definitions are called KEY_BACKSPACE and KEY_DELETE respectively. Keep in mind, however, that KEY_BACKSPACE will refer to whatever "stty erase" shows; this is intentional behaviour on the part of Thomas Dickey (author of curses, and someone who you don't argue with when it comes to terminals. :-) ) Meaning, KEY_BACKSPACE could actually be referring to ^? in the case of xterm (since xterm truly defines backspace as ^?).
Making DF think KEY_BACKSPACE and KEY_DELETE functionally do the same thing might create more trouble than its worth. For example, say you have the input string "foobar" with the cursor blinking over the "b" character. Now you press Delete (^?). The string should then become "fooar" with the cursor on the "a". However if you were to press Backspace (^H) the string should then become "fobar" with the cursor still on the "b".
"Blah blah koitsu ranting... so how do we solve this?"
Simple: the person experiencing incorrect behaviour with their Backspace key needs to find out if what their terminal is sending when pressing Backspace is what the underlying *IX machine (in this case OS X) expects based on their terminal type. If the terminal emulator maps the Backspace
key to ^? (like xterm does), then "stty -a" should show "erase=^?". If it doesn't, then the individual's $TERM is incorrect for the type of emulator they're using, and needs to be adjusted in the emulator itself, or $TERM be set to what the emulator claims to emulate.
This is why when people say "when I do something in my terminal it hurts", my first question is "what's TERM set to, what OS, and what terminal emulator?" There's a multitude of terminal emulators for OS X -- all behave differently because some emulate xterm, some emulate vt100, and then there's Apple's native Terminal.app which emulates some god-awful combo-mess of vt102 and xterm.
So OP, fix your terminal emulator or fix your environment. :-)