On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 08:34:11AM +0900, Miles Bader wrote:

Fair enough! Let me try to give a concrete example. I have a buffer in
Emacs-Lisp mode, and type the characters

'(defun'

fine. Now I try to add a space after the n. In stead of the (yellow)
cursor moving on and shopwing space between iteself and the 'n', I get
a yellow block two characters wide. Now I examine exactly what sort of
characters are present, by selecting the text and submitting it on
standard input to cat -A in a bash shell. The answer is

(defun^I$

So it put in a tab instead of a space after 'defun'. Why? The same
thing is happening currently in Fundamental mode:

y^Ito add^Ia space^Iafter the n. In^Istead$

At each of these spurious tab characters, an inactive 'copy' of the
cursor gets left behind, so after a while my buffer has one real
cursor and several pretend ones. I am not experiencing this in bash;
just emacs -nw.

Dan

(admittedly I have no idea why I put whitespace in 'instead'...)