I was running into a very strange glitch with terminal Emacs, showing up as all sorts of weird screen tearing and graphical corruption while moving around within and between files.

tl;dr It turns out that I had inadvertently included a Unicode variation selector, which is a zero-width character (so I couldn't see it in the code) but which was throwing Emacs for an absolute loop. Removing that character fixed the problem. Follow along below the fold to learn how I figured it out.

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I like having a system-wide keyboard shortcut that activates some form of text editor. That allows me to press the shortcut, type whatever I have in mind, navigate away from the editor, and get back to what I was doing. (This is sometimes called “universal capture” or “ubiquitous capture” in GTD-land.)

I’ve used lots of different programs to accomplish this over the years: NotationalVelocity/nvALT, SimpleNote, Obsidian, just to name a few. However, I wanted to combine the quick access of universal capture with the editing power of Emacs. I spent some time recently setting up my Linux laptop to accomplish this.

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