Backspace in Emacs has effect but does not update display in term and ansi-term (Emacs 23, cygwin)

Question

In Mx term , I type ab , press backspace, then ab_ is visible (_ is space). Hitting enter tells no such command a , so the deletion has effect but the the terminal is not updated correctly. Likewise for home and end buttons.

I start Emacs from cygwin using dos prompt or mintty, same effect. What chould be wrong?

Answer 1

I have just had this exact problem, also in cygwin, rather than any proper Linux.

As suggested by the comments, the TERM seems the key. Mine was already eterm-color . Setting it to xterm fixed it for me.

export TERM=xterm

Obviously there are other values to try if xterm doesn't work for you.