'e' key doesn't work in terminal emulators

R

radiart

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I have tried in Terminal, XTerm, and iTerm - none of them allow me to type 'e' or the character I type immediately after e.

I am running OS X 10.4.4 on a 20" iMac G5 2.0 GHz. This has been a problem for a while, and occurred in 10.4.3, maybe 10.4.2 and earlier (I don't use the terminal all that much on my mac, I don't rememer when this started). The only way I can type commands with an e in them is auto-complete. Pasting text does not work.

Perhaps e has been remapped to some sort of command, but I don't know how or where. I tried trashing the terminal plist file, that didn't help. I tried repairing my disk permissions because I was out of ideas - it didn't help. There are no odd keybindings in the options that look responsible.

I have searched google, this forum, and asked around IRC but found nothing helpful. I am fairly new to OS X so I have no idea where these kind of problems start. Does anyone have any ideas?
 
Canadian. (Not Canadian French). This is what it has always been, but I changed it to U.S. just to check - no luck.
 
I hate to ask, but do you have another keyboard you can try?

have you also tried the open firmware reset mentioned on this site?
 
I've had odd issues like this and it's almost always a preference problem (I know it sounds out there, but trust me I've seen an issue almost exactly like this 3 times now).

Try this. Create a new user on your system (Blue Apple -> System Preferences -> Accounts -> Plus sign (bottom left corner). Create a new user, close Accounts. Then go to the blue Apple -> Log Out. Now log in as the new user and see if it does the samething.

If it does, then I'll help you with preferences troubleshooting. Otherwise, we can try a few other thigns to try and figure out where the problem is.
 
Which shell do you normally use? Does it happen in all he different shells? zsh? tcsh? bash?
 
UpQuark77: Same problem with a different keyboard. I appreciate the response, though.

Kasracer: I created a new user, and you're right - the problem wasn't there.

Giaguara: That got me thinking - I normally use bash, so I quickly tried zsh and it worked.

So I started looking into some of the hidden files in my home directory (I can't believe I didn't think of this before) and there were some odd lines in .inputrc that I removed. 'e'+other keys had been remapped to various things I don't need. Not sure how those got there, but anyways it works now.

Thanks everyone for the responses - I feel kind of silly it was so simple but now I know for next time :)
 
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