Home and End keys not working
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Why do not my Home and End keys work in terminals?
Technically, this is a little wrong. Your home and end keys work fine in a terminal. They do not work, however, in your shell (bash).
Typically, command line applications use libreadline for interaction. If you know it does not use readline, this tactic may or may not work. For instance, ncurses applications most likely do not use libreadline, BUT ncurses is usually smart enough to map your Home/End keys properly.
libreadline problem
Usually applications are able to fix this on their own. The number one cause of this problem is setting your $TERM variable to something it is not in bashrc. All modern terminals are smart enough to set their own term variable.
Do not set $TERM manually. Let the terminal do it.
When in bash, do the following:
echo $TERM
You may or may not like the value it sets (i.e. 'xterm' when you want 'xterm-256color'). That is fine. Typically there is a way to configure your terminal to change this without changing the TERM variable.
For xterm and urxvt, it is in ~/.Xresources
XTerm*termName: xterm-256color ... URxvt*termName: rxvt-unicode
For screen, you can set the $TERM variable in your ~/.screenrc with:
term screen-256color
For tmux, you can set the $TERM variable in your ~/.tmux.conf with:
set -g default-terminal screen-256color
TODO add more terminal configurations here
I do not touch my TERM value, and the keys still do not work right
This can happen. Not everything is covered 100% of the time. But libreadline had a workaround for this. libreadline maintains mappings for more obscure keys in /etc/inputrc (or ~/.inputrc for user-by-user changes).
If you look at the Arch /etc/inputrc, you will see the following lines:
"\e[1~": beginning-of-line "\e[4~": end-of-line "\e[7~": beginning-of-line "\e[8~": end-of-line "\eOH": beginning-of-line "\eOF": end-of-line "\e[H": beginning-of-line "\e[F": end-of-line
All of these try to map your Home/End key values. To see the actual value of yours, you can use yet another libreadline binding, called "quoted-insert" which outputs the actual value of a key, rather than issuing the keypress. quoted-insert is typically "Ctrl-v". Let's try an example (done on urxvt):
Ctrl-v F6 outputs ^[[17~ Ctrl-v Ctrl-c outputs ^C Ctrl-v Home outputs ^[[1~ Ctrl-v End outputs ^[[4~
For future reference, the ^[ is a literal (quoted-insert) Esc keypress. This means that these keys are actually sending "ESC [ 4 ~". In inputrc syntax, the ESC key is expressed with "\e" (as you can see above).
For example the urxvt keys shown above would be:
"\e[1~": beginning-of-line "\e[4~": end-of-line
If your Home and End key values are not listed in /etc/inputrc (as you can see, with the ^[ to \e conversion, mine ARE listed), you need to add them there. 99% of the time this will not effect other terminals. Technically, one should add these settings to ~/.inputrc, because it's easier to keep track of, and stays with your user that way. You can also do MUCH cooler things with a user-specific inputrc (See Readline for more details).
Adjusting terminfo (If nothing helps)
- Run
infocmp $TERM >terminfo.src
- Edit terminfo.src file in current directory to adjust keystrings. For example change khome and kend.
khome=\E[1~, kend=\E[4~,
- Run
tic terminfo.src
This command creates ~/.terminfo directory
- Add
export TERMINFO=~/.terminfo
to your profile
Why do not my Home and End keys work in application XYZ?
If you've gone through the above, your Home and End keys are properly entered into /etc/inputrc and ~/.inputrc or you have created a local terminfo, this is no longer system wide. Your keys are correct, but the application is not. You will have to consult the documentation for the given app on how to do this. Hopefully we can add some examples here as we come across broken applications.
Lynx
In lynx.cfg, use the quoted-insert characters above, replacing ^[ with \033:
setkey "\033[1~" HOME setkey "\033[4~" END
URxvt/Rxvt
In your X resources (in ~/.Xresources file) you should add something like following:
URxvt*keysym.Home: \033[1~ URxvt*keysym.End: \033[4~
Zsh
See Zsh#Key bindings.
Less
Create file ~/.less with
$ lesskey -o .less - #command \e[4~ goto-end \e[1~ goto-line
or for making less work in xterm
$ lesskey -o .less - #command \eOF goto-end \eOH goto-line
or you may create systemwide config the same way.
Nano
If you run nano within URxvt/Rxvt, then add these lines to ~/.Xresources:
URxvt.keysym.Home: \033OH URxvt.keysym.End: \033OF URxvt.keysym.KP_Home: \033OH URxvt.keysym.KP_End: \033OF
'KP_Home' & 'KP_End' are on the number pad (KP = Key Pad).