Text being highlighted in emacs even when the mark is deactivated

Question

I am a beginner user of emacs. Even after I have deactivated the mark by pressing ctrl+spc still the text gets highlighted when I move across the text. Emacs works fine before I set mark for the first time while editing a file. Once I use the mark this problem begins.

Answer 1

Why do you think that you have "deactivated the mark by pressing C-SPC"?

Do you have transient-mark-mode enabled? (It is enabled by default in Emacs 23 and later.) If so, the you do not see highlighting by default - the mark and region are not active, and if you hit C-SPC once then you see highlighting when point is moved away from the mark that C-SPC just set - the mark and region are active.

When the region is active, you can hit C-g to inactivate it, removing the region highlighting.

If this is not the behavior you see then probably something in your init file is causing the problem. In that case, try starting Emacs without your init file: emacs -Q. If the problem goes away with emacs -Q then recursively bisect your init file to find the problem.