DELFails to Delete
Every keyboard has a large key, usually labeled
which is ordinarily used to erase the last character that you typed.
In Emacs, this key is supposed to be equivalent to
When Emacs starts up on a graphical display, it determines
automatically which key should be
DEL. In some unusual cases,
Emacs gets the wrong information from the system, and
ends up deleting forwards instead of backwards.
Some keyboards also have a
Delete key, which is ordinarily
used to delete forwards. If this key deletes backward in Emacs, that
too suggests Emacs got the wrong information—but in the opposite
On a text terminal, if you find that
BACKSPACE prompts for a
Help command, like Control-h, instead of deleting a character,
it means that key is actually sending the ‘
BS’ character. Emacs
ought to be treating
DEL, but it isn’t.
In all of those cases, the immediate remedy is the same: use the
command M-x normal-erase-is-backspace-mode. This toggles
between the two modes that Emacs supports for handling
if Emacs starts in the wrong mode, this should switch to the right
mode. On a text terminal, if you want to ask for help when
is treated as
F1 instead of C-h; C-?
may also work, if it sends character code 127.
To fix the problem in every Emacs session, put one of the following
lines into your initialization file (see Init File). For the
first case above, where
BACKSPACE deletes forwards instead of
backwards, use this line to make
BACKSPACE act as
For the other two cases, use this line:
Another way to fix the problem for every Emacs session is to
customize the variable
normal-erase-is-backspace: the value
t specifies the mode where
nil specifies the other mode. See Easy Customization.