Dan Glastonbury <Dan.Glastonbury(a)adelaide.maptek.com.au&gt; writes: Well. With XEmacs 21.0 and above, if you set your tty-erase char correctly you will at least not call help, i.e. stty erase ^h before staring XEmacs. Try this first, just to check whether it works for you. The better long term solution is to leave stty-erase at ^? (which is probably what it is now) and fix your Xterm. XTerm*vt100.translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f) \n\ <Key>Delete: string(0x1b) string([3~) i.e. Backspace returns ^? (ascii DEL) now!. However XEmacs 21.0 will then turn it into 'BS' correctly!. The second line makes Delete return some escape code so you can actually distinguish between them. You can however leave that part of. Jan P.S. I am pretty sure this came from some FAQ. At least I copy/pasted this in from somewhere.