Fix key settings (Home/End/Insert/Delete) in .zshrc when running Zsh in Terminator Terminal Emulator

Question

I'm running Ubuntu 11.04. I installed the Terminator Terminal Emulator 0.95, and Zsh, version 4.3.15.
I have (commonly known) problems with my keys inside the Zsh. At least these:

• Home/End, nothing happens
• Insert/Delete/PageUp/PageDown: a "~" is typed

I already tried some configurations for .zshrc which should solve the problem, but no approach really worked so far. Maybe this is related to the combination of Terminator and Zsh. I took the 2 configs on this page: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=428669.

Does oneone have a similar configuration (especially Terminator and Zsh) and figured out what needs to be inserted into the .zshrc to fix the key settings?

Jadotville

Answer 1

To know the code of a key, execute cat, press enter, press the key, then Ctrl+C.

For me, Home sends ^[[H and End ^[[F, so i can put i my .zshrc in my home dir

bindkey  "^[[H"   beginning-of-line
bindkey  "^[[F"   end-of-line
bindkey  "^[[3~"  delete-char

These codes could change with the terminal emulator you use.

autoload zkbd ; zkbd will create a file with an array of keycodes to use, like bindkey "${key[Home]}" beginning-of-line, and you can source a different file depending on the terminal.

Dimpledimwit

The cat thing did not work for me, but this blog post over here shows od -cwhich did the trick for me – Dhobi

read works like cat for this. Just remember that ^[ is escape code, \e in .inputrc. – Vladi

I use '^V' followed by desired keystroke. Seems to work anywhere. – Masse

A list of available widgets such as beginning-of-line is available here. For instance, delete-char is the widget normally associated with the delete key. – Jibber

Have been trying to fix this for an hour and realized that other sollutions didn't work because my keyboard is set to swedish. Your cat trick fixed that, thanks! – Chopper

How would one switch out the different keyfiles created by zkbd for different shells, eg. ssh'ing into a box from terminator vs running zsh directly on the machine vs using PuTTY yields different keycodes – Bramlett

Coming from windows to mac has been so painful and mapping these keys in zshrc worked first shot. Just remember to source ~/.zshrc and then get working – Rhody

Answer 2

Thanks to @lolesque, but the solution doesn't work with me. After using zkbd to check my key binding, I came out the below solution. BTW, my $TERM is xterm.

bindkey  "^[[1~"   beginning-of-line
bindkey  "^[[4~"   end-of-line

Hope it helps.

Mesial

This works for me when I am ssh'ed to zsh via hyper.js on windows – Conlon

if you read the answer you'll see that he provided the complete solution with cat command. And my keys is same as yours. Thank you. – Pagano

I found that I have lolesque's bindings in xterm, but yours inside tmux – Shepherd

Answer 3

For me on WSL2 (Windows 10) this was it

bindkey "^[OH" beginning-of-line
bindkey "^[OF" end-of-line

The cat trick did not work for me as it printed ^[[H as in the accepted answer but I was able to find out the ^[OH sequence by typing Ctrl+v Home in the new Window Terminal running zsh.

Alita