Fixing backspace in screen in terminal on OSX

Screen is awesome, I am surprised I never bothered to learn about it earlier. It all stemmed from the fact that I was working on a pretty low powered VM and couldn’t afford to open multiple xterms on it. Later when I started SSH’ing into it the screen utility came in pretty handy, however when you are on OSX and ssh into a remote box and use screen, when you hit backspace, it doesn’t instead gets the screen to give you a ‘wuff — wuff’ and I am not kidding, that’s the default message.
The fix is simple, run this on the console, close and restart, sorted.

defaults write com.apple.Terminal TermCapString xterm

About rp

Architect for large, highly scalable LAMP applications and Technical Manager with special focus on metrics based continuous improvement of teams and products. Rajat has close to a decade of experience of a very wide range of skills related to infrastructure, middleware, app servers all the way to front-end technologies and software development methodologies including agile, iterative waterfall, waterfall as well as ah-hoc startup using the right approach in the right context to reduce time to market.