Back to original question - why does my prompt change to "arg: 3" when I hit Alt+3?

[Chris G]

On Fri, Nov 05, 2010 at 02:02:09PM +0100, Christian Dywan wrote:
> Am Fri, 5 Nov 2010 11:31:16 +0000
> schrieb Chris G <cl at isbd.net>:
> 
> > OK, so Alt+character doesn't work as I expect in xfce4-terminal.  :-)
> > 
> > Can anyone explain why it does what it does?  When I hit Alt+<digit>
> > my bash prompt changes to "(arg: <digit>)", hitting further
> > Alt+<digit> keys adds digits to the prompt so that hitting, for
> > example, Alt+5, Alt+4, Alt+3, Alt+2 gives me a prompt (arg: 5432).
> > 
> > Ah, what it does is to repeat the next character entered arg times,
> > what an extremely un-useful facility, does anyone have any idea where
> > it comes from?  It's not from bash because the same thing happens
> > within my editor. 
> 
> I suggest you read the manual page of your command line interpreter.
> 
> It's a bash feature and not at all related to Terminal.
> 
"Oh yes it is"!  :-)

If I run *exactly* the same login etc. but with an xterm then I don't
get readline() stealing my Alt key.  I'm running *exactly* the same bash
and everything in the xterm but it most certainly *doesn't* give the
multiplier and so on when entering Alt+character.

Similarly in rxvt and other terminal windows, none of them exhibit this
readline() behaviour.

So it's *somehow* related to xfce-terminal even if only to the extent
that xfce-terminal tells readline() that the Meta key is Alt and xterm
and rxvt *don't* tell readline() that the Meta key is Alt.

-- 
Chris Green