Yesterday I posted a message describing the display update problems we
were experiencing using emacs-20.2 on our alphastations running
Digital Unix 4.0B. I wanted to know if anyone else had observed
similar behavior at their sites, and if so, if they had an
explanation. I received three responses, and all were helpful. Many
thanks to:
Graham Allan <ALLAN_at_mnhep1.hep.umn.edu> Mike Iglesias
<iglesias_at_draco.acs.uci.edu> Avraham (Avi) Y. Shapiro
<shapa_at_erols.com>.
Both Graham and Mike assured me that they had *not* seen the
problematic behavior, and Avi's comments about his editor problems
under CDE (not emacs) got me thinking in a different direction. I've
since resolved the issue at our site. I'll describe below what was
involved since it seems to be platform specific. The information may
prove useful for others.
Once I learned that others were successfully running emacs-20.2 under
dUnix4.0B, I started to look into site specific questions. After some
testing, I narrowed down the investigation to our system .login file.
It turns out that our .login file sources a (csh) script which sets
the TERM environment variable. The following line from that script
seems to be the culprit:
# Initialize the terminal.
set noglob; eval `tset -sQ`; unset noglob.
When this line is commented out, emacs-20.2 updates the display
properly. Nothing else breaks, as the default shell is tcsh, which is
intelligent enough to supply the necessary terminal initialization
information given the TERM environment variable. With tcsh, `tset'
isn't necessary. It is interesting to note, however, that under other
operating systems, `tset' doesn't seem to cause emacs problems. This
seems to be a property of the DEC `tset.' Anyhow, if others experience
emacs problems, they may want to take a look at how their terminals
are being initialized.
Again, thanks to all that answered so promptly!!
Debra Alpert
Faculty of Arts and Sciences Unix Systems Group
Harvard University
Received on Tue Feb 24 1998 - 20:20:33 NZDT