New Directions in Commandline Editing

Update: I finally isolated this to gnome’s multiple input method support. Shift + Space is bound by default to switch input sources, and it is in whatever the next input method is that unusual things happen. Turn that stuff off in the keyboard shortcuts! Find below the original post about the visible symptoms.

Dear lazyweb,

Where in {bash, readline, gnome terminal, wayland, kernel input} does the following brain damage, newly landed in debian testing, originate?

  • pressing ctrl-u no longer erases to beginning of line, but instead starts unicode entry with a U+ prompt, much like shift-ctrl-u used to do, except the U is upper-cased now
  • hitting slash twice rapidly underlines the first slash (as if to indicate some kind of special entry prompt, but one I’m unfamiliar with and I cannot get it to do anything useful anyhow), and then just eats the second slash and the underline goes away
  • characters typed quickly (mostly spaces) get dropped

This stuff is so hard to google for and it is killing my touch typing. Email me if you know, and I’ll update this accordingly so that maybe google will know next time.