Emacs locks hard over PuTTY when £ is entered.

Question

I'm using emacs (21.4.1) via PuTTY (0.60) connected to a CentOS5.3 box with a UK keyboard. Whenever I enter the £ symbol emacs locks hard, making the whole putty window unresponsive and loosing all changes.

Edit:

Futher to pajato0's suggestion, I get the following message:

à (translated from £) runs the command self-insert-command
    which is an interactive built-in function in `C source code'.
  which is an interactive built-in function in `C source code'.
It is bound to many ordinary text characters.

So it looks like I need to rebind the key. How would one do this?

Answer 1

You could try another ssh client to see if it is putty-specific. I tend to just run

startxwin.sh           # from a MinGW rxvt terminal

after which an xterm pops up in which I do

ssh -X some.unix.box   # from the new xterm

after which I fire up a tabbed terminal emulator in which I keep several sessions 'forever'. And my US keyboard has no Pound sign so no way for me to test your issue...

Answer 2

I would look at the character set translation that putty is performing (window->translation in settings). It could be that the character code that is being sent for a pound symbol (don't have a UK keyboard...) locks up the terminal somehow, or that the character that is being returned in response to the keypress is causing some similar behavior (e.g. waiting for the completion of a code point).

You might want to try it with everything set to UTF-8 (charset/locale on linux side, and on Putty translation), to minimize the chances of confusion...

Answer 3

To determine what role, if any, Emacs is playing in your scenario, I would suggest that you try C-h k # where # is your pound key. If it hangs, then Emacs is not getting the key at all and you have a Putty/Windows issue most likely. If Emacs tells you the function binding then you have some hope of fixing it by changing the key binding. My best guess is that Putty is capturing the key and sending it to Windows which is dropping the ball.

Answer 4

In response to your question "how does one rebind a key": use the define-key function, e.g.

(define-key global-map [S-Home] 'beginning-of-buffer)

The hard part is figuring out how to represent your key and then choosing a suitable function. For example, you might do something like:

(defun make-euro ()
  "Euro")

(define-key global-map # 'make-euro)

But I would also suggest that you file a bug since if trying to self-insert your # key causes Emacs to hang, that is clearly Emacs breakage that should get fixed.