In my case I *do* get different behavior in emacs -Q between 26.3 and 27.0.60 (75a9eee8b). I had to replace minibuffer-keyboard-quit with abort-recursive-edit, since the former doesn't exist in 26.3. The initial minibuffer hint looks the same in both cases: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Test1: ^ |--- cursor After pressing C-f, 26.3 gives the expected result: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Test2 ^ |--- cursor However, 27.0.60 gives me the following bizarre content in the minibuffer (where did that square bracket come from?): 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Test1: [0 1 2 3 4 in which the cursor is on the 0 at the very top. The read-key function appears to be identical between the two revisions, aside from a trivial change to support tab-bar, so I have no idea where the culprit may lie.