Disable keycode printing in urxvt

Question

When I press alt + left arrow, Urxvt prints [D, or alt + up arrow prints [A.

Is there a way to disable this behavior so that urxvt just does nothing?

Answer 1

What's happening is that urxvt is translating the key chord Alt+Left into the escape sequence \e\e[D (I use \e to represent an escape character). This is a reasonable choice; another common one is \eO1D.

You should configure the applications running in the terminal to understand that \e\e[D means Alt+Left. For bash and other applications using the readline library, add a line like this in your ~/.inputrc (in this example, I make the key combination move backward word by word):

"\e\e[D": backward-word

Alternatively, configure rxvt to send \eO1D (and if necessary teach your applications to understand this as Alt+Left). This might be more convenient than \e\e[D because it doesn't have two control characters in a row. You can configure rxvt's key bindings through X resources. Put the following line in your ~/.Xresources (many environments load it when you log in; to load the file manually, run xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources):

URxvt.keysym.Meta-Left: \033O1D

Answer 2

These can be configured in ~/.Xresources file. Urxvt has Urxvt*keysym options to remap keycodes (see Urxvt man page) For example:

Urxvt*keysym.A-Left: command:\000
Urxvt*keysym.A-Right: command:\000

This will remap alt+Left and alt+Right to nothing.

You need to remember to do xrdb ~/.Xresources in order to this work, and spawn a new Urxvt terminal.