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Re: Alt-Shift-P freezes XTerm

The culprit is tcsh, not XTerm. With bash, Alt-Shift-P produces a colon.

I added this to my .XDefaults

xterm*altIsNotMeta: true
xterm*altSendsEscape: true

so that Alt-Shift-P becomes ESC-P. The problem now does not occur in tcsh.

Thanks to the correspondents on the list.

On Sat, 2023-10-14 at 15:49 +0200, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
On Sat, Oct 14, 2023 at 08:38:22AM -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote:
On Sat, Oct 14, 2023 at 07:07:57AM +0200, 
tomas@tuxteam.de
 wrote:
On Fri, Oct 13, 2023 at 01:06:20PM -0700, Van Snyder wrote:
I haven't figured out how to unlock the XTerm after accidentally giving
it Alt-Shift-P.

I'm not seeing whatever it is you're seeing here.  On Debian 12, if I
launch an xterm (simply "xterm &") with bash running inside it, and
press Alt-P I get this character: ð

Shift-Alt-P gives me this character: Ð

Oh, that's interesting. Our setups seem to differ in some way.
What I see with AltGr (not Alt) is Þ, with shift it's þ (this
is Thorn; you are seeing eth)

It seems that your left alt isn't doing Meta and mine does
or something :)

[...]

The behaviour [of Alt-Shift-P] is the same if I do "ESC P". Does that "hang your
Xterm", too?

Looks like your bash is in emacs (default) mode.  Pressing Esc P in
emacs mode triggers this guy:

It is.

"\eP": do-lowercase-version

Well, we were talking about the uppercase one (remember: alt-shift),
so it is this:

"\ep": non-incremental-reverse-search-history

    non-incremental-reverse-search-history (M-p)
        Search backward through the history starting at the current line
        using  a  non-incremental  search  for  a string supplied by the
        user.

I'm not 100% sure what that means, but maybe you can figure it out if
you continue experimenting with it.  I don't normally run bash in emacs
mode myself, so many of these readline features are foreign to me.

I tried to describe what it does, and yes, this matches the behaviour
pretty well: readline (I suppose) prints a colon (I guess this is meant
as a prompt), you may enter some string, and then it searches back in
the history for the last matching command -- so like an incremental
backward search without the incremental bit :-)

Anyway, all of that's an interesting tangent, but I still don't get
a "freeze" in xterm from any of this.

Absolutely. To both.

Van Snyder, can you try running this in your xterm:

    bind -p | grep P

That should tell us whether you have any unusual readline bindings
involving the letter P (capital) which might be at fault here.  In my
shell, I just have these:

unicorn:~$ set -o vi
unicorn:~$ bind -p | grep P
"P": self-insert
unicorn:~$ set -o emacs
unicorn:~$ bind -p | grep P
"\C-xP": do-lowercase-version
"\eP": do-lowercase-version
"P": self-insert

That's what I get too. Now curious as to what Van Snyder gets :-)

Cheers
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