Here's my problem - hopefully I can explain this well enough:
I use Putty on Windows, and then start a gnu screen session. I may run several shell commands in putty, and then in the same screen, run emacs -nw. The problem is that when I exit emacs, the scrollback buffer (in putty) is messed up. What was on the screen when I started emacs is gone, and if I scroll upward I see various artifacts of screen (e.g. the screen "bar" at the bottom, etc.).
If I don't use screen and just open emacs -nw directly from putty, all my history is still there in the buffer when I exit emacs.
Likewise, if I do use screen, and use vi within a screen instead of emacs, when I exit vi, everything is there.
Is this just some weird interaction with putty and emacs? Is there a way to fix it?
Have you tried setting scrollback buffer size to something else than default? scrollback
In .screenrc put this line:
defscrollback 10000
Here's my config .screenrc. Tried to reproduce this problem but no luck... you can try if it fixes for you:
termcapinfo xterm* ti#:te#
startup_message off
vbell off
autodetach on
altscreen on
shelltitle "$ |bash"
defscrollback 10000
defutf8 on
nonblock on
hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string '%{= kw}[ %{= kb}%H%{= kw} ][%= %{= kw}%?%-Lw%?%{= kW}%n*%f %t%?%?%{= kw}%?%+Lw%?%?%= ][ %{r}%l%{w} ]%{w}[%{r} %d/%m/%y %C %A %{w}]%{w}'
bind 'q' quit
Just at the end I would as well suggest you getting familiar with tmux -> http://tmux.sourceforge.net/
BTW. hopefully you're using newest version of PuTTy right? :) - > http://puttytray.goeswhere.com/
This sounds like Emacs and Screen are stepping on each others toes over the alternate screen feature of your terminal.
I cannot reproduce this issue, but maybe putting the following in your ~/.screenrc would help:
altscreen on
Have you considered using tmux as an alternative to GNU screen?
Related
Why does tmux change the terminal from xterm to screen, and how can I fix the resulting text color change in emacs? I think the easiest way would be to prevent it from changing to screen in the first place.
I can use TERM=xterm emacs file.ext to do it temporarily, but that's just a workaround that doesn't solve the root of the problem.
Furthermore, the function keys no longer work in emacs when using tmux. Instead of F3 and F4 being macro shortcuts, they just print a tilde as they would in the shell. This seems unrelated to xterm/screen mentioned above. What is happening here, and how I can fix this?
tmux sets TERM to screen because that terminal description is limited to things that tmux knows how to work with. Like screen, tmux translates features from the outer terminal description to the inner.
If a special key (function-key, cursor-key, etc) does not have an exact match in the terminal description, tmux will ignore it.
The default configuration for PuTTY sends different escape sequences for F1-F4. The sequences which PuTTY sends are not in the terminal description for xterm.
Here's a comparison of the two (as a CSV file, but readable enough):
NAME,putty,xterm
kf1,\E[11~,\EOP
kf2,\E[12~,\EOQ
kf3,\E[13~,\EOR
kf4,\E[14~,\EOS
kf5,\E[15~,\E[15~
kf6,\E[17~,\E[17~
kf7,\E[18~,\E[18~
kf8,\E[19~,\E[19~
kf9,\E[20~,\E[20~
kf10,\E[21~,\E[21~
kf11,\E[23~,\E[23~
kf12,\E[24~,\E[24~
kf13,\E[25~,\E[1;2P
kf14,\E[26~,\E[1;2Q
kf15,\E[28~,\E[1;2R
kf16,\E[29~,\E[1;2S
kf17,\E[31~,\E[15;2~
kf18,\E[32~,\E[17;2~
kf19,\E[33~,\E[18;2~
kf20,\E[34~,\E[19;2~
You'd have trouble getting PuTTY to send F13-F20, but will certainly run into trouble using PuTTY and tmux with TERM=xterm.
Regarding colors, the same issue applies. The screen terminal description tells applications that the terminal can support 8 colors, and tells how to display those eight colors. If your external terminal can do more, then tmux and screen hide that.
The conversion is not perfect. GNU screen has a feature where it looks for a corresponding screen.$TERM terminal description (i.e., concatenating the outer TERM value to screen). tmux does not do that: it makes assumptions regarding xterm. But PuTTY is not xterm...
ncurses has several of those concatenated terminal-names for terminal descriptions, but no one has suggested a way for tmux to use them automatically.
I have Emacs on a Kubuntu 15.04 OS and I have a problem in showing the selected region; if I run emacs in the terminal windows with -nw option, I can set marks and I see the selected region highlighted; but if emacs starts in a window, the selected region is not highlighted, though it is still selected (ctrl+w cuts that part). Note that transient-mark-mode doesn't affect this behaviour, whether it is enabled or not.
Do you see this behavior when you start Emacs using emacs -Q (i.e., without an init file)? If not, then recursively bisect your init file until you locate the culprit code. You can do use command comment-region to comment out the region (with C-u it uncomments). Comment out 1/2, then 3/4, 7/8,... until you find the culprit.
If you see a problem using emacs -Q then give a step-by-step recipe to reproduce it.
If not, and if you narrow your init file to locate the problem but you still need more help at that point, report as much as you have found out, specifically. Again, step-by-step specifics help.
Ok, so thanks to Drew I finally managed to resolve this issue!
I had a file with path: /etc/X11/Xresources/x11-common
With the following content:
! $Id$
! load color-specific resources for clients that have them
#ifdef COLOR
*customization: -color
#endif
! make Xaw (Athena widget set) clients understand the delete key
! this causes problems with some non-Xaw apps, use with care
! *Text.translations: #override ~Shift ~Meta <Key>Delete: delete-next-character()
What I just did was moving that file away, running xrdb with an empty input, and everything went fine!
Now I just need to figure out what the content of that file was and what to do if I need to put it back where it was.
Thanks a lot for your precious help, Drew!
When I open files with emacs it adds 12;rgb:1c1c/1c1c/1c1c on the top. How can I prevent this?
I have installed emacs on a clean reinstalled debian system.
Emacs: GNU Emacs 24.4.1
Terminal Emulator: MobaXterm Personal Edition v7.7
System (local): Windows 7 Ultimate
System (remote): Debian 8.0 "jessie" stable
As noted, "MobaXterm" is not "xterm". According to its webpage it is
Based on PuTTY/MinTTY with antialiased fonts and macro support
Lacking a detailed change history, and the problem reported by the OP, it seems that MobaXterm is based on PuTTY from a while back, and does not implement all of the control sequences which PuTTY does, much less those of xterm.
The particular sequence which is not recognized (referring to XTerm Control Sequences) may be this:
OSC Ps ; Pt ST
OSC Ps ; Pt BEL
...
Ps = 1 2 -> Change text cursor color to Pt.
That is part of a group of controls predating ANSI color support in xterm, referred to as dynamic colors.
Based on comments in other places, it seems that the problem could lie within the OP's Emacs configuration, by using scripts which do an ad hoc test of TERM to decide if it can do colors, rather than inspecting the terminal capabilities. See Terminal emacs colors only work with TERM=xterm-256color where someone worked around this problem by modifying their init.el to add special cases for rxvt and xterm.
Emacs of course is capable of doing colors in different terminals. See emacs colors based on $TERM environment variable for comments. And TERM=xterm on Debian has provided color for quite a while. So in a typical configuration, color should "just work".
However, there are different ways to configure Emacs. Attempting to reuse some 256-color script can fall into the hole dug by developers who assume that every terminal is just like the one in front of them. See the Emacs wiki page X Term Colors for an example.
!! SOLVED IN MOBAXTERM VERSION 8.2 !!
Looks like your terminal settings are out of sync. The settings of your terminal need to agree with the termcap/terminfo settings on the server. Try to set the TERM variable in the shell on the server to a value which better matches the terminal emulation capabilities of your terminal (common values are xterm, xterm-color, vt520, and vt102) or correspondingly change the settings of the terminal to match the current TERM value. (If the terminal is buggy, you may need some trial and error to find a mode which works well for you.)
VT220 works fine; Edit Session / Terminal Settings / Type: vt220
I'm using zsh in OS X Terminal.app and for quite a while, I've been longing for a way to jump back and forth between prev/next prompts in the terminal's output.
One convenience with this would be to be able to review (and track errors at) the end of each command's output; eg. when you building stuff from source with ./configure; make; make install. Note: I'm obviously not referring to jumping back and forth in the command-history, but for a way to take a peek at the endings of each command's output.
Has anyone heard of such functionality in the *nix (preferrably also Mac) world? Would it require some sort of OS-centric Terminal plugin, or can it be programmatically done via a shell script which can be tied to a keyboard shortcut? Maybe I'm the only one thinking about this? :)
Edit: Here's an example scenario: Let's say I want to compile and install some program (using standard ./configure && make && make install procedure) and after the make command, I run into some errors. Now, the way I understand it (I may be completely wrong), the crucial error causing the make command to fail usually shows up in the last line(s) in the output, no? Anyway, at this point, I might do something like cat INSTALL to read up on the INSTALL document to check whether there's something I've missed. NOW, if I want to go back to see what the error was, that caused my initial make command to fail, I then have to manually scroll up to that position again, since my cat INSTALL command printed a ton of text after it.
I don't know if this scenario is the most elucidative – but there are many other situations where I wish I could just "jump" back to previous prompt lines and check up on previous command output; whether it was a simple ls command, make, git status, or whatever it was – swapping positions in the window by means of using prompt lines as "bookmark" positions seems an interesting idea to me.
command + left or right goes between tabs in iterm. is this what you are asking?
Emacs has a shell-mode that runs a shell inside the Emacs editor, providing a rich environment of additional commands for navigating and working with shell commands. This includes commands for going to the previous/next prompt, and deleting the output from commands so you can "clean up" and issue another command.
If you aren't familiar with Emacs: to start a shell inside Emacs, run emacs from the shell, then type Esc-x (or Meta-x, if you have "Use option as meta key" enabled in Terminal > Preferences > Settings > [profile] > Keyboard). This will ask for a command to execute. Enter shell.
To see a list of commands you can use in Shell Mode, enter Control-h m. Here are the ones for moving the cursor to the previous/next prompt:
C-c C-n comint-next-prompt
C-c C-p comint-previous-prompt
These commands would also be useful:
C-c C-r comint-show-output
C-c C-o comint-delete-output
When I start Emacs, its windows and its minibuffer start up floating on the main frame, leaving a lot of empty space (see: here and here). Any idea of what is going on and how to fix it?
I'm using emacs version 23.1.1 on Xmonad
Thanks!
I get the same thing occasionally when doing a TAB expand in shell mode. I don't end up with an empty mini-buf, it usually has all the contents from the shell expand. The only solution I've found so far is to kill the current shell buffer
You might try C-l (recenter-top-bottom). I've used this over the years as a pretty reliable "repaint" operation that will clear up various detritus that occurs on the frame. It is even more helpful when you do not have a window system.
It looks like an odd interaction between Emacs and your window manager. It's as if Emacs is configuring itself to have a certain number of lines and columns in its active window, but the frame the window manager has allocated it is larger.
Can you try running X without Xmonad (ie. just run startX) and then run Emacs? You won't get frame decorations, but you can still use xterm to start it and see what 'natural' size it gets allocated. With the same Emacs configuration, that would narrow it down to some issue with Xmonad.
It's not obvious from the screenshots, as one is definitely in GUI mode, but the other (green on black) looks like it is in text mode. If you force it to run in text mode (emacs -nw), does it take up the same size? Within the shell, do normal commands take up the entire size of the allocated window?
Are the shell variables COLUMNS or LINES set correctly? Do they match the window dimensions? Assuming you are running bash, is shopt checkwinsize turned on? Do regular commands such as ls wrap at the expected margins and scroll to use the entire window?
It is worth ensuring that text mode is being configured correctly before getting GUI mode to work. I have a hunch the way that Xmonad is managing its window sizing may be the culprit, if it is 'forcing' windows to tile in certain arrangements, and the correct X hints aren't being sent. But - that's all just supposition for now...
This partially works (taken from here):
(defun fullscreen ()
(interactive)
(set-frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen
(if (frame-parameter nil 'fullscreen) nil 'fullboth)))
(add-hook 'emacs-startup-hook 'fullscreen)
The windows get corrected, although the mini-buffer is still larger than the usual.
Sounds like a bug, to me. Consider reporting it: M-x report-emacs-bug. Try to provide a recipe starting from emacs -Q.