I've been using a copy of emacs (in a Debian VM I ssh to with putty) at work for a couple of months now, and up until now everything has been working brilliantly... but this morning I'm trying to edit a file in shell-script-mode, and am seeing some weird behavior with text around the cursor.
Basically, when I type the following ( [ ] represents my cursor):
export DATABASE[]
After I've typed the first few characters of the variable name the export statement disappears and the variable name aligns to the left margin, and all I end up seeing is (with the cursor out in the wilderness):
DATABASE []
If I then hit CTRL-L, the screen refreshes, and I see the text as it should be displayed... until I start typing, and then the buffer start acting strangly again (characters disappearing, moving, cursor ending up in the wrong place, etc)
I've not, to my knowledge, added anything to my .emacs file since this last worked as I expect it to, so I'm at a loss as to what could be happening here. It doesn't seem specific to sh-mode either - I've tested a few other file types and observed similar strange behavior. Are there any emacs afficianados out there who might be able to point me in the right direction to figure out what's wrong here?
Thanks in advance
I'm not sure what to suggest, but this sounds awfully like an issue with the terminal: I suspect that Emacs redraws the current line whenever it changes and I guess it tries to do so incrementally. If something's got out of whack with your terminal, then it seems quite plausible that the current word would get written at the start of the line (all Emacs sent) and your cursor would get abandoned "out in the wilderness" :-)
Obviously, this is a new change. Since it doesn't sound like the sort of issue that would be caused by Elisp configurations in your .emacs, you should check whether you've recently upgraded one of
Then maybe the relevant tool will have something in the changelog (which maybe you can disable via a config?)
One thing you could check: you say this isn't just SH-mode. Is it "any mode with syntax highlighting"? Maybe Emacs just sends over the wire the text with the current colour?