You know those annoying problems that you just live with, even though they’ve been annoying you for the past decade or so? You know how dumb you feel when you finally get so fed up with the problem that you actually go spend 15 mintutes figuring out how to fix it?
<p>Well, that’s about how it played out for me with Emacs using xterms. On some machines, for some reason I don’t fully understand, the backspace key gets mismapped with running Emacs and some termkey apps, but works fine in the shell and other places. This seems to be worse when you’re using X11.app on a Mac.</p>
<p>Rather than actually figure it all out, you can put this in your .emacs file:</p>
<p><code> (normal-erase-is-backspace-mode 1)</code></p>
<p>And emacs should work for you about forever on that machine. I’ll check back in on <a href="http://www.hypexr.org/ruboff.shtml">what that actually does</a> next decade.