Home key not working in terminal

Question

I am using GNOME Terminal 2.7.3 and zsh 4.3.9 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu)

Home and End are not working. Nothing happens and nothing gets displayed when I press them. but they work when I press shift + Home (Scrolls to the beginning of shell output.) and also work in other GUI programs. I googled and tried the following. No change :(

  885  bindkey "\e[1~" beginning-of-line
  886  bindkey "\e[H" beginning-of-line
  887  bindkey "\e1~" beginning-of-line
  888  bindkey "\eH" beginning-of-line
  889  bindkey "\e[0H" beginning-of-line

PS: When I am in the last tab and press Ctrl + pagedown I get ;5~ printed on the screen. Does that give any clue?

Answer 1

Escape sequences sent by function and cursor keys consist of an escape character followed by printable characters. Press Ctrl+V then Home. This will insert the escape sequence literally. Then add a bindkey instruction to your ~/.zshrc.

The instruction is likely to be (note O, not 0):

bindkey '\e[OH' beginning-of-line
bindkey '\e[OF' end-of-line

Answer 2

I found I had to hit CTRL-v, let go, then the Home or End key to get the sequences ^[[H and ^[[F for Home and End respectively. Adding the following lines to the .zshrc file solved the problem for me:

bindkey '^[[H' beginning-of-line
bindkey '^[[F' end-of-line

Answer 3

Add these lines to /etc/zshrc and then do a source /etc/zshrc (taken from here)

bindkey '\e[1~'   beginning-of-line  # Linux console
bindkey '\e[H'    beginning-of-line  # xterm
bindkey '\eOH'    beginning-of-line  # gnome-terminal
bindkey '\e[2~'   overwrite-mode     # Linux console, xterm, gnome-terminal
bindkey '\e[3~'   delete-char        # Linux console, xterm, gnome-terminal
bindkey '\e[4~'   end-of-line        # Linux console
bindkey '\e[F'    end-of-line        # xterm
bindkey '\eOF'    end-of-line        # gnome-terminal

Answer 4

I'm on fedora now yet I suggest you to read Archlinux's wiki carefully, all of it: Home and End keys not working.

What I did to fix it:

1. Press Ctrl-V Home, the escaped sequence for Home key is printed. It is not \e[4~ and \e[1~ as I expected to be by looking at /etc/inputrc. It was [H and [F

2. Extract the terminal info infocmp $TERM >terminfo.src

3. Open that file for editing, such as vim terminfo.src, look for khome and kend it's assigned to something, let's say khome=\E[1~ and kend=\E[4~ which is not working in this case. remove it and replace it with the sequence you found in step #1, so for me, after editing it was: khome=\E[H and kend=\E[F.

4. If you want to play it safe make sure [F and [H (or whatever sequence you just used) is not assigned to something else or things will be messed up!

5. run tic terminfo.src which creates ~/.terminfo directory.

6. On top of .zshrc before any and all other commands, put: export TERMINFO=~/.terminfo

Open a new terminal window and you should be fine, home and end must be working now.

P.S: The bindkey method should theoretically work and is easier, but it didn't for me.

Answer 5

This answer explained my problem really good and fixed it.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/686458/5472892

TL;DR: Change your PuTTY terminal type from default xterm to linux.

Maybe someone can use it too.