Terminal – Alt-Left to Skip Words Not Working

bashkeyboard shortcutsreadlineterminal

On a Debian Wheezy machine at previous job, I got used to Alt+Left and Alt+Right to skip between words on active command-line (in bash).

However, since at home I have upgraded to Jessie (Debian 8.0, testing branch) this does not work anymore: instead of skipping to previous word, Alt-Left prints something like D or [D. OTOH, if I open ssh and connect to my headless Debian Wheezy, it does work perfectly.

Furthermore, I just installed Fedora 20 in my new job and here the behavior is the same. This applies to bash, csh and ksh (started under env -i), as well as rxvt-unicode and xfce4-terminal, so it must be something outside these level.

Where else in the stack should I look to find the difference?

Best Answer

You probably had a local ~/.inputrc or global /etc/inputrc file defined that was lost on the upgrade. An easy fix is to create an ~/.inputrc file with the following lines:

## enable Alt-arrows 
"\e[1;3D": backward-word ### Alt left
"\e[1;3C": forward-word ### Alt right

Those will work with xterm and terminator and gnome-terminal but might need to be tweaked for other terminals. Unfortunately, each terminal emulator can use a different syntax. For some more details, see my answer here.

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Ubuntu – Ctrl+C Not Working in GNOME Terminal

Try to do this

$ stty sane

and see if it fixes the problem, also check if the intr is set correctly using

$ stty -a

If you find that intr is set to something different than ^C, then you can also fix it by typing

$ stty intr ^v^c

Changing terminal emulators

The value of the environment variable TERM is used by the server (in system V, or BSD, derived OSes) to control how input is recognized by the system, and what capabilities exist for output. Some terminal types are similar enough that they can be interchanged while still remaining usefull, while others could make the system unusable until you open a new connection with a supported value for TERM. For example, from one Linux system to another, you would probably experience very little difference between vt100, vt220, and xterm settings. Most of the differences would be in how output is displayed, and whether colors or bold fonts are available to that type of terminal. The termcap database lists all the terminal types, with their various capabilities.

As long as you don't switch to a terminal type that your keyboard and screen aren't compatible with, you'll be fine.

read the man page for term, and termcap, on your system for more information.

To change the terminal type:

in bash:

export TERM=vt100

in bourne shell or ksh:

TERM=vt100
export TERM

in csh or tcsh:

setenv TERM vt100

vt100 is a pretty safe terminal to start playing with. it's compatible with xterm, but it doesn't display colors or bold fonts, and may not recognize your F* keys, but you're unlikely to really mess anything up using vt100.

A lot of people use terminal detection in personal init scripts to optimize their user experience depending how how they're logging into the server. For example, set a plain PS1 if you're using vt100, use color and dynamic variables when using bash in an xterm.

Good luck with your research.

Best Answer

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