Re: Emacs starts with current screen contents in its display buffer

[Segundo Bob]

Thanks to James Freer, Rusi, Pascal J. Bourguignon, Emanuel Berg, and 
David Boyd for you help.

I apologize for not responding promptly to the first few suggestions. 
This is my first use of help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.  Since all I knew about 
it what how to send it an email, I expected to receive emails in 
response, but they never came.  By chance I happened on the message 
archive and saw your responses.

For me the "reply via email" button starts an email to the person, but 
not to help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.  I change the email to be to 
help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org and to CC the person.  Is this what I'm supposed 
to do?  Seems very inconvenient and loses the thread connection to 
previous emails.

Is this how help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org works?  Am I doing something wrong?
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Emanuel Berg wrote:

Try not using any packages. Or try reinstalling Emacs. What happens with 
'emacs -Q'?
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I went with removing all emacs files.  This was tricky due to 
dependencies causing "broken packages" when the mark for removal was 
done in the wrong order.  But eventually I succeeded.  I reinstalled 
just package "emacs."  My system is Xubuntu32 14.04 so "emacs" is:

This is GNU Emacs 24.3.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.10.7)
 of 2014-03-07 on toyol, modified by Debian

On my system this emacs has the "Emacs starts with current screen 
contents in its display buffer" problem with no extra packages installed 
and all warnings eliminated.

So I removed all emacs files, and then installed "emacs23".  On my 
system this is:

GNU Emacs 23.4.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.24.21)
 of 2013-10-25 on akateko, modified by Debian

This works fine.  It works fine with no extra packages and with all the 
extra packages that I want to use.  So it is my "solution" to my 
problem.  I will leave the mystery of "Emacs starts with current screen 
contents in its display buffer" to others.

Sorry, I never tried "emacs -Q" on a failing emacs.  I have tried it on 
my now working emacs and noted that -Q behaves differently than -q --but 
I haven't found any documentation for -Q, so I don't know what it does.
---
J. David Boyd wrote:

Then start a shell in emacs, and see what your terminal type is set to...
---
Sorry, I didn't do your experiment on a non-working emacs.  On a working 
emacs I also get "dumb".

--
Segundo Bob
SegundoBob@gmail.com