Michael Sperber [Mr. Preprocessor] wrote: But does your backspace key generate \177? Which it probably shouldn't if your backspace key generates \177. character_to_event translates the code which matches tty-erase-char to 'backspace, provided that the do_backspace_mapping parameter is true (note that this is always the case when called from Fcharacter_to_event). tty-erase-char should be initalised to the terminal's erase setting. The default mapping (if tty-erase-char is nil) is that \177 is mapped to 'delete and \010 is mapped to [(control ?h)]. IOW, nothing will generate 'backspace. You can determine what is coming out of character_to_event using M-: (next-event) -- Glynn Clements <glynn(a)sensei.co.uk&gt;