Re: cursor/tab/highlighting problems in gnome-terminal

[Miles Bader]

Dan Davison <davison@stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:
> '(defun'
>
> fine. Now I try to add a space after the n. In stead of the (yellow)
> cursor moving on and shopwing space between iteself and the 'n', I get
> a yellow block two characters wide.

Interesting, that happens for me too, it does really seem to be a bug in
gnome-terminal.  It doesn't seem to happen if font-locking is turned
off.

> Now I examine exactly what sort of
> characters are present, by selecting the text and submitting it on
> standard input to cat -A in a bash shell. The answer is
>
> (defun^I$
>
> So it put in a tab instead of a space after 'defun'. Why?

Note that what emacs sends to the terminal is _not_ the same as what's
in the buffer, it's a sequence of characters which should make the
terminal render the display Emacs wants to present.

In particular, the terminal redisplay engine can send a TAB character to
move the cursor when it thinks that will be more efficient (in other
circumstances, it might send a sequence of spaces or a cursor-addressing
escape sequence).

-Miles

-- 
Optimist, n. A proponent of the doctrine that black is white.