a helpful link: http://www.squish.net/docs/delbs.html

tset -e ^D

worked for me.

According to the GNU Emacs manual, the correct way to handle this situation is to toggle the variable "normal-erase-is-backspace".

You can add the following to your .emacs file:

(custom-set-variables
`(normal-erase-is-backspace t))

Or use M-x customize-variable. Then tell it normal-erase-is-backspace, and follow the instructions to use the customization buffer to change the value of the variable from nil to non-nil. Save the change for future sessions (this just serves as a way to save the above code to your .emacs file instead of editing the file manually).

Normally emacs detects the keyboard setup so that the keys will operate in the normal expected way. But when using some text-only terminals, emacs may not be able to detect the keyboard setup. The default mode that emacs uses in this case is to map the backspace key to control-h (C-h), which activates the help system.

See these pages for more information:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ma.../Deletion.html
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ma...ot-Delete.html

I just encountered this problem using:

• ssh from Windows, using PuTTY 0.60
• into an AIX 5.3 box
• on emacs 23.1

The DEL key, as usual, runs backward-delete-char (which is what I expected, though I never USE the DEL character...), but the BACKSPACE key was running delete-char. Attempting to rebind the key using C-? failed miserably. I eventually used this trick to get these bindings for my init.el:
THe key insight was discovering that [deletechar] is what I need to bind, not C-?.

Curiously, I compiled the exact same emacs download on Solaris, and it does NOT suffer from this behavior, used from the same PuTTY setup. Weird.