FAQ
What are all those OCOCOCO or ODODODO that appear on the screen?
These are the terminal sequences that MisTTY sends to a program to move the cursor left or right. If you see these printed on the terminal, it means that the program that’s currently controlling the terminal doesn’t support these.
In such situation, you can:
Only type self-inserting characters and DEL.
Press C-c C-q or M-x mistty-send-key-sequence to send what you type directly to the terminal until you turn it off with C-g.
Write a regexp that identifies the situation and add it to M-x customize-option mistty-forbid-edit-regexps.
See the section Terminal vs. Scrollback for more details.
The shell isn’t answering!
Press C-g. If this is just a one-time thing, this will do the trick.
If this keeps happening, check the modeline. Does it contain CMD? It might look like this: misTTY CMD:run. In that case, MisTTY is stuck in long-running command mode. This is likely due to some package leaving overlays to the buffer that confuse MisTTY. To fix that, turn off the option M-x customize-option mistty-detect-foreign-overlays or, if you know which package is causing trouble, remove the corresponding property in in M-x customize-option mistty-foreign-overlay-properties.
For details, see Long-running commands
If this keeps happening and the modeline does not contain CMD, this is likely a bug. Please see Reporting issues for details on filing a bug report.
Why is the cursor jumping around when I move it?
MisTTY jumps over spaces which just “aren’t there”, such as the spaces between the command and the right prompt, spaces added by fish for indentation in multi-line prompts.
If it doesn’t work with your shell or setup, or if you find it confusing, type M-x customize-option mistty-skip-empty-spaces to turn it off.
What’s with the purple line?
This line indicates the region of the buffer that works as a terminal, meaning that it is not fully editable and that some shortcuts, such as TAB are sent directly to the program controlling the terminal.
This is covered in depth in the section Terminal vs. Scrollback.
If you just don’t want to see that line, turn it off with M-x customize-option mistty-fring-enabled
Why doesn’t <insert package here> work in the terminal region?
The terminal region of MisTTY behaves very differently from a normal buffer; many things can go wrong with commands that do more than just editing text.
One such issue is with interactivly editing the buffer over multiple Emacs command, which MisTTY calls a long-running command. There are ways of making such commands work if they don’t already, described in Long-running commands.
Another such issue is with autocomplete, with can also be made to work as described in Auto-complete.
While this works with some packages, it might not necessarily work with the package you want - it might even not be possible to make it work, but we can always try. Please file a bug if you encounter such a package you’d like to work with MisTTY.
… but it used to work!
Older versions used to detect any unknown overlay as a long-running command, described in Long-running commands. Unfortunately, this caused problems with many packages which, leaving overlays around for a long time, prevented MisTTY from working at all.
The good news is that it’s likely easy to make it work again by detecting the specific kind of overlays the package is using. Please see Long-running commands or file a bug mentioning the package you’re using, its version and how you installed it.