If Emacs spontaneously displays `I-search:' at the bottom of the screen, it means that the terminal is sending C-s and C-q according to the poorly designed xon/xoff "flow control" protocol.
If this happens to you, your best recourse is to put the terminal in a
mode where it will not use flow control, or give it so much padding that
it will never send a C-s. (One way to increase the amount of
padding is to set the variable baud-rate to a larger value. Its
value is the terminal output speed, measured in the conventional units
of baud.)
If you don't succeed in turning off flow control, the next best thing
is to tell Emacs to cope with it. To do this, call the function
enable-flow-control.
Typically there are particular terminal types with which you must use
flow control. You can conveniently ask for flow control on those
terminal types only, using enable-flow-control-on. For example,
if you find you must use flow control on VT-100 and H19 terminals, put
the following in your `.emacs' file:
(enable-flow-control-on "vt100" "h19")
When flow control is enabled, you must type C-\ to get the effect of a C-s, and type C-^ to get the effect of a C-q. (These aliases work by means of keyboard translations; see section Keyboard Translations.)
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