I've tried several times to fix a weird problem that I have with emacs and to some extend xemacs under Suse 10.0.
No matter how I start up emacs, it doesn't react to keyboard input. I can't type anything in the window. However, it does recognize all mouse events, and I can use
the menu, highlighting and pasting of text in the window.

I can't find anything wrong with the standard installation that came with the Suse 10.0 distribution. I made sure to have all components installed. I also tried xemacs; the keyboard input works, but it crashes frequently.

This is somewhat frustrating: In spite of all the fancy new text processing softwares that I also have on the system,
openoffice, kate, and more - for a lot of applications, such as C programming, I totally favor emacs, as I have been using it on many systems for decades, and could almost say that the weird commands used in emacs are hard wired in my brain, which makes it so easy to use for me. I could not find any similar problem/solution sofar and hope that someone on this forum has some advice.

thanks to all.


Details on the PC and operating system:
This is an HP with aMD 64 Athlong x2. The keyboard
is the typical HP keyboard with media controls.
I am using KDE as window system. The OS is:
Linux 2.6.13-15.10-smp #1
SMP Fri May 12 16:11:24 UTC 2006 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

One word: vi
That's weird though. Have you tried it in the command line? (I'm sure you have, but whatever).

I tried that. Emacs always brings up a window, I can't find the option to run it in a command window. However, I used a different trick, namely making an ssh login from
an xterm on my PC to itself and then starting emacs. It starts up as in a command window, and it works just as expected: I can type text and edit text.

If I use emacs the normal way, no matter from which type of xterm (console or whatever) I start it, the keyboard seems to be disconnected, as emacs simply ignores all keyboard inputs. It must be some hideous setup problem with the X11 system, but I don't have a clue where to look.

BTW, in the man pages of emacs are lots of references to a directory /usr/local/share/emacs. Interestingly, these things were stored instead under /usr/share/emacs during the Suse 10.0 installation. So I added an additional symbolic link. But that doesn't fix the problems.

p.s.
You mention vi. vi is fine but I barely used it before. emacs is more versatile than vi, and probably something like kate is also more versatile than vi. As I stated, there is no real reason for me to want to switch to something different from emacs, since the commands are hardwired in my head and fingers.

I looked a little longer and found that emacs has of course an option for command line mode:

If I now type

emacs -nw filename

It will open the file in the current xterm window and
I can edit it without a problem.

The old problem, of emacs opening a window but not allowing any keyboard input, remains.