59.3 Garbage on the Screen

If the text on a text terminal looks wrong, the first thing to do is see whether it is wrong in the buffer. Type C-l to redisplay the entire screen. If the screen appears correct after this, the problem was entirely in the previous screen update. (Otherwise, see the following section.)

Display updating problems often result from an incorrect terminfo entry for the terminal you are using. The file ‘etc/TERMS’ in the Emacs distribution gives the fixes for known problems of this sort. ‘INSTALL’ contains general advice for these problems in one of its sections. To investigate the possibility that you have this sort of problem, try Emacs on another terminal made by a different manufacturer. If problems happen frequently on one kind of terminal but not another kind, it is likely to be a bad terminfo entry, though it could also be due to a bug in Emacs that appears for terminals that have or that lack specific features.