Cursor movement screwy on remote sessions.

[Ged Haywood <ged@jubileegroup.co.uk>]

Hi folks,

First post, joined the list today for just this question.  Read the
faqs, Googled etc, didn't see anything remotely related to this.

I use emacs remotely all over the place.  One particular problem gives
me great grief, only when using emacs remotely.

The cursor doesn't reliably move to the place it's supposed to go to
on the screen, with the result that you're inserting/deleting text at
a place diffeent from the one you see on the screen until you refresh.

The problem occurs mostly when I'm using an instance of Emacs which is
running on a machine in Sheffield, England, but I'm sitting in Ceret,
France running an xterm on my local machine.  The screen is about 190
columns dies and 70 rows.  X is not running on the remote host and the
version of Emacs on there was compiled without X.  Until today it was
version 21.2 but now it's 21.3 and that has made no difference to the
problem.

Ordinary characters malmost always ove the cursor properly AFAICT.

Cursor movement sequences like [ESC-f] will move the cursor in the
most unexpected of ways.  Sometimes it will move back to the beginning
of the line instead of to the end of the next word.  Oddly enough, an
[ESC-b] usually does what's intended.  [ESC-c] will capitalise the
word but not move the cursor to the end of it and it may move it to
somewhere in the middle of it, and it may make the word look garbled.

Sometimes I press the space bar after a word and the cursor doesn't
move at all. [ESC-190-space] will put the cursor in the right place.

Usually [CTRL-L] will put the cursor in the right place.

The cursor generally stay on the right line, just in the wrong column.

I have the feeling that this is some weird interaction with ncurses.

If I run Emacs using the same xterm but over a VPN to a machine at my
office near Sheffield (about 25 miles south of the problem machine) I
have no problems.  I sometimes have simlar problems running Emacs on
the Sheffield machine from my office, but not so bad.

I never have problems like this with Vi.  I hate Vi, but I'll go and
scrub with carbolic now anyway.

Any suggestions?

73,
Ged.