Unwanted characters entered in terminal Emacs
reddit / emacs

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PreferredBadger672 · 2022-04-06 07:50

When I run emacs in a terminal and change focus from the terminal
window, emacs will insert characters into the buffer. In an empty
scratch buffer, it just entered `[O [I [O [I]]]]`. I'm pretty sure
this has something to do with the terminal sending Esc [, and I have
paredit-wrap-square bound to M-[.

Does anyone know how to deal with this behavior? Are there typically
terminal settings to not send certain sequences, or is there something
I can configure in Emacs to prevent insertion of these characters?

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rpluim · 2022-04-06 09:49

Those are `focus-in` and `focus-out` events. emacs-27 and later has
support for them (assuming you're running something that identifies as
xterm).

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PreferredBadger672 · 2022-04-06 10:15

I'm a little lost on how those events work or how to use them to
prevent those inputs, but installing
[https://github.com/veelenga/terminal-focus-
reporting.el](https://github.com/veelenga/terminal-focus-
reporting.el/blob/master/terminal-focus-reporting.el) fixes the issue
for me... so I guess that's good enough for now! I'm sure there's a
way to do it w/o the plugin but I'll figure it out when my brain is
working :) thank you for the help!

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rpluim · 2022-04-06 12:49

Looking at that package, it seems to be doing something very similar
to what Emacs does. Glad you got things working.