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 03:27:49PM +0100, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
> On ven., 2010-11-05 at 13:25 +0000, Chris G wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Just a random thought, but maybe *they* steal your alt key, preventing
> bash to see it.

It's possible, but unlikely.  The Alt + character keys also work as I
want/expect in my GUI editor and it seems unlikely to me that it is
doing anything clever with the Meta/Alt key, it's much more likely to do
nothing. 
> > 
> > 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. 
> 
> Try to set $TERM to various values too.
> 
TERM is set to xterm in both xterm and xfce4-terminal.

-- 
Chris Green