backward?
See the SET TERMINAL/BACKSPACE command on OpenVMS V8.2 and later. This behaviour involves the Motif virtual key bindings. When a Motif application starts, it looks at the vendor string returned in the display connection information and attempts to match the string to a table of virtual bindings. You can override the default bindings in your decw$xdefaults.dat file. Here is the entry you would make to get the default VMS bindings.