I am using GNU Emacs 24.4.1 (edit: also seen with 24.5.1). Some old output from vc-mode (I think) is appearing in the minibuffer:
Auto-merging foo/bar
I am not doing any version control operations at the moment, but this text is stuck in the minibuffer. Pressing C-g replaces it briefly with Quit, but it comes back with the next keystroke.
What it isn't: it's not a recursive edit. C-] or abort-recursive-edit gives the error No recursive edit is in progress and the awkward text in the minibuffer is still there.
It's not text selected with the mouse since I am running in a text console (GNU screen session over ssh) with no mouse support.
I have tried the switch-to-minibuffer command from http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MiniBuffer but that gives the error Minibuffer is not active. Yet still this awkward text keeps appearing.
It is not a screen size problem (with stale text because Emacs is not aware of the correct size of the terminal window) because I can resize the terminal window and Emacs resizes with it correctly... with the text still displayed in the minibuffer.
Sometimes I have seen this effect with two or more lines of text in the minibuffer. In fact, my current Emacs session has that in one client session (emacsclient -nw) in one screen, with the main session showing only one line. The client session shows several lines of version control gunk in the minibuffer:
Auto-merging foo/bar
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in foo/bar
How can I make it go away?
This could happen if you hit
C-gto terminate a running shell command. This would leave the minibuffer window pointing to the*Shell Command Output*buffer.As described in bug #25209, you could check whether that has happened by calling
(minibuffer-window)in the scratch buffer:and fix it with:
This has been fixed in this commit, and the fix was released as part of Emacs 26.1.