When Emacs is launched from its icon in the Mac OS Dock, all modes derived from term (such as M-x ansi-term) exhibit strange behavior: printing a long line which contains a Unicode character causes line truncation and generally puts the terminal in a bad state. Resetting the terminal fixes the problem. The problem does NOT occur when Emacs is launched from the command line, i.e., the terminal modes all work correctly if Emacs is invoked by running the following at a (non-Emacs) shell: "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs" The problem does not seem to be related to any Emacs initialization code in .emacs or init.el. It occurs consistently when all initialization code is commented out. Attached is a sample file which causes the problem; just save it, launch a shell in ansi-term, and cat the file. In addition, when launched from the Dock, ansi-term requires something like the following to display Unicode characters correctly: (defadvice ansi-term (after advice-ansi-term activate) (set-buffer-process-coding-system 'utf-8-unix 'utf-8-unix)) This is NOT required when launching Emacs from the command line!