Tilde with gnome-terminal instead of function keys in Ubuntu

Question

When I'm pressing the function keys, for example F12, I get a tilde symbol on my cursor position (~ sign). How can I turn this of ? This issue affects both shells, Bash and the Zsh.

What dotfiles should I paste ?

Answer 1

On bash from version 4.1, you can stop that from happening by sticking this into ~/.inputrc:

"\e[": skip-csi-sequence

That will make it ignore any keycode that isn't bound to anything else.

Answer 2

You can assign something to each of those keys. You can also assign a null string.

To find out the sequence emitted by each key, press Ctrl-v then the function key. On my system, for F12, I see ^[[24~. The "^[" represents Escape which will be represented by \e in the lines below.

In Bash, in your ~/.inputrc file, add lines like this:

"\e[24~": ""

or, if you want to make it output something:

"\e[24~": "Super User"

which will make the corresponding key do nothing.

In Z shell, you can add bindkey commands to your ~/.zshrc file like this:

bindkey -s "\e[24~" ""

or, if you want to make it output something:

bindkey -s "\e[24~" "Super User"

• Adam Tolley: I believe the trailing ~ is being inserted by your shell, after the ctrl-v sequence executes, and will therefore not register correctly with keybind -- "\e[24~" should read "\e[24"
• Dennis Williamson: @AdamTolley: That is incorrect. Where would the shell get the idea that it should output a tilde? Can you show any evidence that your assertion is true? As counter evidence, I tried the sequence Ctrl-V F12 in: Bash, dash, ksh, zsh shells and in Gnome, xterm and terminator terminals under Ubuntu 18.04 and in all cases the tilde was output. It even worked similarly on a MacBook Pro in Bash in Terminal using Ctrl-V Fn-F6 (F12 changes to the widget screen).