When I establish a SSH connection to my machine using PuTTY, I find that the Control + Arrow keys behave unexpectedly when working with vim or nvim in the bash terminal.
For instance, in vim, escaping Ctrl + Left Arrow and just the Left Arrow both output ^[OD.
While in the case of nvim, they both output <left>.
However, when I open vim or nvim inside tmux, the keys function as expected. In this case, the escaped Control + Left Arrow generates ^[[1;5D, while the Left Arrow outputs ^[OD.
In nvim, the corresponding outputs are <C-Left> and <Left> respectively.
I found a little workaround by ticking the box next to Terminal > Features > Disable application cursor keys mode. This enables proper functionality for the Control + Arrow keys in both vim and nvim, even outside of tmux.
Escaping Control + Left Arrow now results in ^[[1;5D, and the Left Arrow yields ^[OD. (Likewise with nvim returning <C-left> and <left respectively)
However, this change introduces a new issue. The arrow keys stop functioning when navigating through commands such as top, htop, or man (when inside bash). They still continue to work within tmux.
So, to address this, I attempted to add the following to ~/.inputrc
"eOD": backward-word
"eOC": forward-word
"eOA": previous-history
"eOB": next-history
Regrettably, this doesn’t rectify the problem;
So, I’m hoping to find a solution that allows Ctrl + Arrow keys to work within a standard bash environment, without compromising the scrolling functionality. Or, the other way around; Either goes…
Tmux config:
$ echo $TERM
screen
$ cat /usr/share/docs/tmux/example_tmux.conf
# Enable RGB colour if running in xterm(1)
set -ag terminal-overrides ",screen-256color:Tc"
# Change the default $TERM to tmux-256color
set -g default-terminal "screen-256color"
# Turn the mouse on, but without copy mode dragging
set -g mouse on
unbind -n MouseDrag1Pane
unbind -Tcopy-mode MouseDrag1Pane
