Why would Esc-p or Ctrl-p not work in one terminal but work in all the others?

Somehow, when I start my X session in Ubuntu 16.04, I get a Gnome Terminal window with 6 tabs and they all works as expected except for the last tab. That one loses the Esc-p / Alt-P functionality.

Since it works in the other 5 tabs, my idea would be that's because it is the last tab. At the same time, if I close that tab and reopen a new one, that new one works as expected.

That terminal window gets opened automatically whenever I open my X session.

Another thing that does not work either is Ctrl-d. The first time I hit that one, I get a ^D in the console and it does not get killed.

As a side note, one thing that I do in my .bashrc is stty -ctlecho so I do not get the ^C all the time (which otherwise prevents me from using copy/paste!) So it feels like that specific like does not get executed since I see the ^D when typing the Ctrl-d key in the console.

What could be going wrong?

The concerned binaries:

alexis 23335 22889 0 08:31 ? 00:00:22 /usr/lib/gnome-terminal/gnome-terminal-server alexis 23376 23335 0 08:31 pts/19 00:00:00 bash alexis 23377 23335 0 08:31 pts/20 00:00:00 bash alexis 23378 23335 0 08:31 pts/21 00:00:00 bash alexis 23379 23335 0 08:31 pts/22 00:00:00 bash alexis 23387 23335 0 08:31 pts/23 00:00:00 bash alexis 23430 23335 0 08:31 pts/24 00:00:00 bash alexis 24960 23335 0 08:53 pts/5 00:00:00 bash alexis 25387 23335 0 09:02 pts/6 00:00:00 bash 

2 Answers

I found out today what the problem is.

I changed my prompt a few days ago to include time (H:M:S) after the current path, so that way I can see when I ran a command. This is useful when I want to have an idea of how long a command takes without having to each time think of using /usr/bin/time.

This addition made the length of the prompt that much longer (9 more characters, with the space) and the Esc-p / Alt-P functionality gets turned off because it decides that the position of the cursor is too far away from column 1.

If I do:

cd .. 

just once, the length of the prompt is reduced just enough that the functionality returns!

Note that Ctrl-R still works.

changed my ~/.inputrc in vi editing mode with following configuration

set completion-ignore-case on set show-all-if-ambiguous on set show-all-if-unmodified on set editing-mode vi set keymap vi-insert "\C-p":previous-history "\C-n":next-history "\C-a.":beginning-of-line "\C-e.":end-of-line "\C-l":clear-screen