Strange behavior when killling text in term/multi-term [duplicate]

Question

multi-term is my current goto when I want a command line in Emacs. However, I have noticed a strange behavior, and I am not sure whether it is a bug, or if it can be configured.

If I type a command at the prompt - or any text for that matter, and kill the text with backward-kill-word (M-BACKSPACE for me), the text no longer shows up, but behaves like it is still there (see the screenshot, and you will know what I mean). This is what happens when I type ls, kill the text with backward-kill-word, type ls again, and hit enter.

A similar, but slightly stranger thing happens when I move to the front of the text and use kill-word. Below is a the result of typing ls, moving to the beginning of the line, killing the text, and typing ls again (notice the cursor position too).

This certainly seems buggy, but I am not sure. This happens in term as well, which is to be expected, so the problem is likely with term and inherited by multi-term. If I just delete one character at a time, nothhing goes wrong (but who has time to delete one character at a time! I use Emacs so I don't have to do such things. I am not an animal!) Also, this only happens in char mode, not line mode, which leads me to believe that maybe it is an intentional feature that I just don't understand. The docs term include the following sentence:

In char sub-mode, each character (except `term-escape-char') is sent immediately to the subprocess.

I don't actually understand what this means, but sound potentially related...Any ideas what is going on? Thank you!

Answer 1

This is not a bug. You can't use emacs commands in term-char-mode, you must toggle to term-line-mode for these commands...

But, you can use the terminal commands instead. For example C-w is the terminal backward-kill-word. fortunately, a lot of commands have (almost) the same behavior in terminal and in emacs (C-k, M-c, M-l, M-. ...).

Another problem is that multi-term (as term) intercept some commands so you must change the default configuration for using them.

Here the muti-term configuration I use: http://djangoliv.blogspot.fr/2015/10/emacs-term.html

important precisions:

• I am using two instances of emacs. One for the terminal (the conf above) and another (server) for the rest. It let me use terms in another frame but with emacs facilities.
• I use C-x (not C-c) as prefix in emacs term.
• I use tabbar and tabbar-more (http://djangoliv.blogspot.fr/2015/11/tabbar.html)

Hope this help.