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I have set up zsh to use emacs mode. But typing Alt+f or Alt+b inserts weird symbols (accented letters and so on), rather than moving around by word in the shell like it should. Since I don't ever want to insert the "ae" symbol into a shell prompt, how can I get zsh to behave?

I had the same problem with bash, but now that I'm actually taking the time to customise zsh, I thought I'd ask...

AltGr+b etc. produces different weird symbols...

I'm using Ubuntu 10.4

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Are you using gnome-terminal? – Dennis Williamson Sep 3 '10 at 17:54
xterm, I believe. Is that the same thing? – Seamus Sep 3 '10 at 18:11
no xterm is a program (which practically ships as part of xorg), so is gnome-terminal. gnome-terminal is an X Terminal however, and that's often abbreviated as xterm. Just to clarify any confusion – xenoterracide♦ Sep 3 '10 at 18:34

1 Answer

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It's not zsh that's misbehaving, it's xterm. The reason it's misbehaving is an obsolete setting that causes xterm to send character number x+128 when you press Alt together with character number x. The normal behavior in a text terminal is to have Alt+a send ESC a.

To tell xterm to leave 8-bit characters alone, turn off the XTerm.VT100.eightBitInput resource (despite the name, it doesn't affect what happens when you enter an 8-bit character). You'd normally do this by adding the following line to ~/.Xresources:

XTerm.VT100.eightBitInput:      false

~/.Xresources is read when you log in in most unix distributions. To read it immediately, run the command

xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources
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