Re: Selection region and delete

[Juha Nieminen <nospam@thanks.invalid>]

Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> In article <jujefg$ti$1@speranza.aioe.org>,
> Juha Nieminen <nospam@thanks.invalid> wrote:
> 
>> In older versions of emacs (when running from X) it used to be that if
>> you had selected a region and pressed the delete key, it removed the
>> selected region. Now it just works as if no selection had been made
>> (ie. it just removes the character at the cursor).
>> 
>> I'm too accustomed to the old behavior. How to restore it?
> 
> Customize the variable delete-selection-mode.

To what? And how?

There's already a "'(delete-selection-mode t)" under the
"(custom-set-variables" in my .emacs, and it has no effect on this.

If I do a M-x describe-variable delete-selection-mode, it says
"It is void as a variable."

If I add the line "(setq delete-selection-mode t)" to my .emacs,
then describe-variable says "Its value is t", and if I use nil instead
of t it says it's nil. In none of these cases does the delete key
function properly.

If I select the region with the mouse, then the delete key removes the
region. If I select the region with the keyboard (using shift) and press
shift-del, then it removes the region. However, if I select the region
using the keyboard and press just delete, it doesn't work.

The last one of those cases happens to be the most usual way I use to
delete a region, and it used to work.

I have been searching for information on this for over an hour, and I cannot
find the solution. Even gnu's own documentation says that by setting
delete-selection-mode to 1 it should work, but it doesn't.