Re: Text selection can't be erased by pressing delete

[Bob Proulx]

Gabriel TEIXEIRA wrote:
> I've been working with three simultaneous emacs windows, each one  
> containing a diferent project, and I noticed that two of those three are  
> presenting a weird behaviour.

On what system are you running emacs?  Is this GNU/Unix, Cygwin, MSYS,
other?  Running in a terminal window, or under a X11, or other native
graphics?

> When I select a text in those windows (like by pushing Shift and
> then the arrow keys), and then I push the key Delete, I expect that
> the selected/highlighted text be erased, but instead, it erases a
> single character to the left of the cursor (like would happen
> without the selection) and the selection disappears (although the
> same operation works with Backspace or Shift+Delete normally).  It
> seems that the Delete key is not anymore aware of the text
> selection.

That would be the "normal" traditional behavior of Emacs on Unix
machines for all of time prior to the recent introduction of Microsoft
key bindings.

> It is even more weird the fact that this doesn't happen with the
> window that I opened the last and the other windows that I opened
> after to check the behaviour. I seems that emacs "wears" after some
> time opened.

That does seem strange that it would change behavior depending upon
whether you have launched subsequent emacs processes.

> Anyone have any idea of what's this? Is this a bug or I typed
> accidentaly any command that triggers this behaviour?

I do not use CUA mode but the behavior makes me wonder if something is
causing it to be enabled and then disabled somehow.

  http://www.emacswiki.org/CuaMode

What is the behavior when using emacs without customizations?

  emacs -q

And without any initialization?

  emacs -Q

Thinking that there must be something in the initialization that is
behaving undesirably.

Bob