Hitting enter (bound to eca-chat--key-pressed-return) has no effect

[magthe]

I'm wondering if there's some dependency that's missing and causing a silent failure, because I see similar behaviour on my newly installed Linux system.

On my new system

AFAICS ECS starts fine

❯ pgrep -a eca
19653 /home/elrond/.emacs.d/eca/eca server

and the version reported by emacs is

eca-emacs: 34c760e (2026-05-09) | server: eca 0.133.3 | emacs: GNU Emacs 30.2 (build 1, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.24.51, cairo version 1.18.4)

When pressing enter I only see a newline, there seems to be no communication with the LLM. When watching the logs I see nothing happen at all.

On my other system

I have the same version and it works as expected. When watching the logs I see entries like this

:eca/chat-prompt 58ms
:db/upsert-cache 28ms
received unexpected request providers/list
received unexpected request jobs/list
:eca/chat-prompt 42ms
:db/upsert-cache 44ms

[ericdallo]

@magthe I suspect this is a issue on your side after exploring eca-emacs side, to make sure I pushed a new eca-doctor command which should help debugging issues like this one, please update and paste the result of that command!

[magthe]

Here's the output of (eca-doctor)

# eca-doctor

Paste this buffer into your bug report.

## Versions

- eca-emacs:   34c760e (2026-05-09)
- eca server:  eca 0.133.4
- emacs:       GNU Emacs 30.2 (build 1, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.24.51, cairo version 1.18.4)
- system-type: gnu/linux

## Chat

### Inspected chat buffer

- buffer:            <eca-chat[taranis]:1:0>
- major-mode:        eca-chat-mode
- derived from `eca-chat-mode': yes
- `eca-chat-parent-mode': gfm-mode
- default-directory: ~/Work/taranis/

### Key bindings in chat buffer

- RET        → eca-chat--key-pressed-return
- <return>   → eca-chat--key-pressed-return
- C-m        → eca-chat--key-pressed-return

### Likely shadowing / input translation

- current-input-method:  nil
- electric-indent-mode:  t
- electric-pair-mode:    nil
- electric-quote-mode:   nil
- evil-mode:             t (state=normal)
- viper-mode:            nil
- god-local-mode:        nil
- smartparens-mode:      nil
- paredit-mode:          nil
- corfu-mode:            t
- company-mode:          nil

### ECA chat state

- eca-chat--id:               20e8cd2e-7b50-4c87-b4b2-1f48c77a8989
- eca-chat--closed:           nil
- eca-chat--chat-loading:     nil
- eca-chat--pending-question: nil
- (eca-session): found (id=1, roots=("~/Work/taranis/"))

### Prompt overlays

- prompt-area overlay:  561..561
- prompt-field overlay: 581..581
- point:                589
- (eca-chat--prompt-content): #("/doctor" 0 7 (fontified t))

### Hints

- No obvious issue detected by the static checks.

I tried running /doctor too, but nothing happens. Except that it does seem to talk to the ECA server well enough to fetch completions -- this is in the logs

:eca/chat-query-commands 0ms

[magthe]

Or have the key bindings in evil been changed?

<insert-state> RET		eca-chat--key-pressed-newline
<insert-state> S-<return>	eca-chat--key-pressed-newline
<insert-state> <return>		eca-chat--key-pressed-newline

<normal-state> RET		eca-chat--key-pressed-return
<normal-state> S-<return>	eca-chat--key-pressed-newline
<normal-state> <return>		eca-chat--key-pressed-return

eca-chat-key-pressed-newline enters a new line, but eca-chat-key-ressed-return sends the prompt.

I can't recall I've had to switch to normal mode to send the prompt before...

[magthe]

I'll close this and try to rebind keys to solve this.

[ericdallo]

Confirming for posterity: not an eca-emacs bug. We only bind RET to send and S-RET to newline in eca-chat-mode-map. The insert-state RET → newline comes from evil-collection-eca, a new module that treats eca-chat as REPL-like (controlled by evil-collection-repl-submit-state, default 'normal). It didn't exist in older evil-collection releases, hence the surprise.

Quick fix — either (setq evil-collection-repl-submit-state 'insert) globally, or override per-mode:

(with-eval-after-load 'evil-collection-eca
  (evil-collection-define-key 'insert 'eca-chat-mode-map
    (kbd "<return>") 'eca-chat--key-pressed-return
    (kbd "RET")      'eca-chat--key-pressed-return))

Probably worth raising upstream — feels like the eca default should be 'insert since it's a chat, not a REPL.