emacs and PuTTY

emacs and PuTTY

[John Oliver]

We have several users who SSH to a server with PuTTY and run emacs
there.  Unfortunately, there seems to be some issue with PuTTYs terminal
emulation and emacs (emacs-21.3-4.10 on RHEL 4) which makes the cursor
jump around and do some weird things like that.  They tell me that
hitting Control-L "fixes" it for a minute or two, but it'll start
happening again.  I've gotten around this for some people by installing
CygWin and exporting the display to their machine, so they can run
Xemacs.  But some people just want to stick with CLI.  One user uses
Tera Term Pro, and is happy with its' terminal emulation, but TTP is an
ancient program that doesn't even support SSH... he uses it to telnet to
one ancient server, and from there SSH to the live machine :-)  I know
about TTSSH, but that isn't the answer I'm looking for ;-)

How can I get PuTTY and emacs to be happy with each other?  Please note,
I'm one of those crazy vi people... I don't know anything about emacs.
If the answer is in some emacs settings, I could use more handholding
than "Just do the XYZ function!" :-)

-- 
* John Oliver                              http://www.john-oliver.net/ *

Re: emacs and PuTTY

[Springfield]

John Oliver <joliver@john-oliver.net> writes:

> How can I get PuTTY and emacs to be happy with each other?  Please note,
> I'm one of those crazy vi people... I don't know anything about emacs.
> If the answer is in some emacs settings, I could use more handholding
> than "Just do the XYZ function!" :-)

Putty and Emacs get along ok, I expect the problem is with the terminal
type that Emacs is using. What is the value of (getenv "TERM") from
within Emacs? What OS is the host running?

Cheers,
Spring
-- 
"The world is more like it is now then it ever has before."
- Dwight Eisenhower

Re: emacs and PuTTY

[Billy Patton]

John Oliver wrote:
> We have several users who SSH to a server with PuTTY and run emacs
> there.  Unfortunately, there seems to be some issue with PuTTYs terminal
> emulation and emacs (emacs-21.3-4.10 on RHEL 4) which makes the cursor
> jump around and do some weird things like that.  They tell me that
> hitting Control-L "fixes" it for a minute or two, but it'll start
> happening again.  I've gotten around this for some people by installing
> CygWin and exporting the display to their machine, so they can run
> Xemacs.  But some people just want to stick with CLI.  One user uses
> Tera Term Pro, and is happy with its' terminal emulation, but TTP is an
> ancient program that doesn't even support SSH... he uses it to telnet to
> one ancient server, and from there SSH to the live machine :-)  I know
> about TTSSH, but that isn't the answer I'm looking for ;-)
> 
> How can I get PuTTY and emacs to be happy with each other?  Please note,
> I'm one of those crazy vi people... I don't know anything about emacs.
> If the answer is in some emacs settings, I could use more handholding
> than "Just do the XYZ function!" :-)
> 

I know this is not much help, but I had the same problem at a contract 
job.  All  I can remember is that I fixed it in my .Xdefaults.
Unfortunately I don't have access to that company anymore and I don't 
remember how I arrived at the fix.  I think I used groups.google.com to 
ask a question (a unix group).
search for bpatton, might be of some help

Re: emacs and PuTTY

[Pascal Bourguignon]

John Oliver <joliver@john-oliver.net> writes:

> We have several users who SSH to a server with PuTTY and run emacs
> there.  Unfortunately, there seems to be some issue with PuTTYs terminal
> emulation and emacs (emacs-21.3-4.10 on RHEL 4) which makes the cursor
> jump around and do some weird things like that.  They tell me that
> hitting Control-L "fixes" it for a minute or two, but it'll start
> happening again.  I've gotten around this for some people by installing
> CygWin and exporting the display to their machine, so they can run
> Xemacs.  But some people just want to stick with CLI.  One user uses
> Tera Term Pro, and is happy with its' terminal emulation, but TTP is an
> ancient program that doesn't even support SSH... he uses it to telnet to
> one ancient server, and from there SSH to the live machine :-)  I know
> about TTSSH, but that isn't the answer I'm looking for ;-)
>
> How can I get PuTTY and emacs to be happy with each other?  Please note,
> I'm one of those crazy vi people... I don't know anything about emacs.
> If the answer is in some emacs settings, I could use more handholding
> than "Just do the XYZ function!" :-)

Well, a few days ago I used emacs "22.0.91.1" thru PuTTY for five
minutes and didn't notice anything strange. (Used it to send an email).

Perhaps you could try a more up to the edge version of emacs?


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/
You never feed me.
Perhaps I'll sleep on your face.
That will sure show you.

Re: emacs and PuTTY

[Torsten Mueller]

John Oliver <joliver@john-oliver.net> schrieb:

> How can I get PuTTY and emacs to be happy with each other? Please
> note, I'm one of those crazy vi people... I don't know anything
> about emacs. If the answer is in some emacs settings, I could use
> more handholding than "Just do the XYZ function!" :-)

I used Emacs 21.3 for two years on HPUX 11 in a PuTTY window. I didn't
configure anything special - it just worked from scratch with the
default settings. Perhaps they have special key mappings in their
.emacs which will not work in PuTTY.

T.M.

Re: emacs and PuTTY

[Brendan Halpin]

John Oliver <joliver@john-oliver.net> writes:

> We have several users who SSH to a server with PuTTY and run emacs
> there.  Unfortunately, there seems to be some issue with PuTTYs terminal
> emulation and emacs (emacs-21.3-4.10 on RHEL 4) which makes the cursor
> jump around and do some weird things like that.  They tell me that
> hitting Control-L "fixes" it for a minute or two, but it'll start
> happening again.  

Have you checked LANG issues? My linux boxes have LANG=en_IE.UTF-8
and putty has to be told to use UTF-8, otherwise the terminal
becomes garbled if any non-ASCII range characters appear. 

Brendan
-- 
Brendan Halpin,  Department of Sociology,  University of Limerick,  Ireland
Tel: w +353-61-213147 f +353-61-202569 h +353-61-338562; Room F2-025 x 3147
mailto:brendan.halpin@ul.ie  http://www.ul.ie/sociology/brendan.halpin.html

Re: emacs and PuTTY

[Rob Thorpe]

On Jan 22, 7:57 pm, John Oliver <joli...@john-oliver.net> wrote:
> We have several users who SSH to a server with PuTTY and run emacs
> there.  Unfortunately, there seems to be some issue with PuTTYs terminal
> emulation and emacs (emacs-21.3-4.10 on RHEL 4) which makes the cursor
> jump around and do some weird things like that.  They tell me that
> hitting Control-L "fixes" it for a minute or two, but it'll start
> happening again.  I've gotten around this for some people by installing
> CygWin and exporting the display to their machine, so they can run
> Xemacs.  But some people just want to stick with CLI.  One user uses
> Tera Term Pro, and is happy with its' terminal emulation, but TTP is an
> ancient program that doesn't even support SSH... he uses it to telnet to
> one ancient server, and from there SSH to the live machine :-)  I know
> about TTSSH, but that isn't the answer I'm looking for ;-)
>
> How can I get PuTTY and emacs to be happy with each other?  Please note,
> I'm one of those crazy vi people... I don't know anything about emacs.
> If the answer is in some emacs settings, I could use more handholding
> than "Just do the XYZ function!" :-)

That's odd, it should work.  Have you checked that PuTTY is setup to
recieve a sensible character set?
Others on gnu.emacs.help may know what the problem is, so crossposted
there.

Re: emacs and PuTTY

[Robert Thorpe]

> Others on gnu.emacs.help may know what the problem is, so crossposted there.

I see you've done that, sorry.

Re: emacs and PuTTY

[John Oliver]

On Tue, 23 Jan 2007 10:38:29 +0000, Brendan Halpin wrote:
> John Oliver <joliver@john-oliver.net> writes:
>
>> We have several users who SSH to a server with PuTTY and run emacs
>> there.  Unfortunately, there seems to be some issue with PuTTYs terminal
>> emulation and emacs (emacs-21.3-4.10 on RHEL 4) which makes the cursor
>> jump around and do some weird things like that.  They tell me that
>> hitting Control-L "fixes" it for a minute or two, but it'll start
>> happening again.  
>
> Have you checked LANG issues? My linux boxes have LANG=en_IE.UTF-8
> and putty has to be told to use UTF-8, otherwise the terminal
> becomes garbled if any non-ASCII range characters appear. 

The server is RHEL4, and so, yes, uses UTF-8  But making that change in
PuTTY doesn't solve this issue.

And, yes, there are lots of non-ASCII characters involved here.  Most of
our users want to see non-English characters rendered correctly, and
using Xemacs is just what the doctor ordered.  But there's one who wants
to see the characters not rendered, but in whatever the "base" code is.
I don't know squat about languages and character sets and such, so I
don't know the right terms to use :-(

-- 
* John Oliver                              http://www.john-oliver.net/ *

Re: emacs and PuTTY

[John Oliver]

On Mon, 22 Jan 2007 14:30:33 -0600, Billy Patton wrote:
> I know this is not much help, but I had the same problem at a contract 
> job.  All  I can remember is that I fixed it in my .Xdefaults.
> Unfortunately I don't have access to that company anymore and I don't 
> remember how I arrived at the fix.  I think I used groups.google.com to 
> ask a question (a unix group).
> search for bpatton, might be of some help

I tried searching, but found only this post.

Were you having an issue with Xemacs?  I don't see how .Xdefaults would
affect a purely CLI environment... the user with the problem is on a
windows PC and uses the CLI emacs.  Xemacs works perfectly for everyone
else.

-- 
* John Oliver                              http://www.john-oliver.net/ *

Re: emacs and PuTTY

[John Oliver]

On Mon, 22 Jan 2007 20:06:29 +0000, Springfield wrote:
> Putty and Emacs get along ok, I expect the problem is with the terminal
> type that Emacs is using. What is the value of (getenv "TERM") from
> within Emacs? What OS is the host running?

RHEL4

I don't know how to "getenv TERM" inside of emacs... I'm a vi user :-D
I just had to Google to figure out how to get out of the damn thing :-)

I looked in the .emacs for the user in question, and there's no TERM
set, so I assume he's using whatever the default is.

-- 
* John Oliver                              http://www.john-oliver.net/ *

Re: emacs and PuTTY

[Brendan Halpin]

John Oliver <joliver@john-oliver.net> writes:

> On Mon, 22 Jan 2007 20:06:29 +0000, Springfield wrote:
>> Putty and Emacs get along ok, I expect the problem is with the terminal
>> type that Emacs is using. What is the value of (getenv "TERM") from
>> within Emacs? What OS is the host running?
>
> RHEL4
>
> I don't know how to "getenv TERM" inside of emacs... I'm a vi user :-D
> I just had to Google to figure out how to get out of the damn thing :-)

Do ESC : (getenv "TERM") RET
i.e. ESC-: puts you in the emacs-lisp interpreter in the mini
buffer, type (getenv "TERM") including the ()s, hit return. The
value of $TERM will be echoed. 

Brendan
-- 
Brendan Halpin,  Department of Sociology,  University of Limerick,  Ireland
Tel: w +353-61-213147 f +353-61-202569 h +353-61-338562; Room F2-025 x 3147
mailto:brendan.halpin@ul.ie  http://www.ul.ie/sociology/brendan.halpin.html