#908227 ksh: the status of the options should not depend on $VISUAL

Package:
ksh
Source:
ksh93u+m
Submitter:
Vincent Lefevre
Date:
2026-06-08 04:11:01 UTC
Severity:
wishlist
Tags:
#908227#5
Date:
2018-09-07 14:58:41 UTC
From:
To:
Arrow keys no longer work in an interactive shell. Here's what I get
with Up, Down, Right, Left:

cventin:~> ksh93
$ ^[[A^[[B^[[C^[[D

Same issue with xterm, rxvt and GNOME Terminal. Thus this is not a
terminal issue.
#908227#10
Date:
2018-09-07 15:09:50 UTC
From:
To:
They work only after a ssh (including "ssh localhost").
#908227#15
Date:
2018-09-10 17:04:27 UTC
From:
To:
Control: retitle -1 ksh: the status of the options should not depend on $VISUAL
Control: severity -1 wishlist
wrapper to emacs, so that $VISUAL does not match *macs* and the emacs
option is not set in this case. This has the effect to disable the
arrow keys.

I have 2 comments:

1. The fact that the status of the emacs option depends on $VISUAL
is ugly, because the program name does not mean much. And at least
for Debian, I think that this is a very bad idea, because a user
may have VISUAL=sensible-editor, which may correspond to Emacs.
Thus I'm leaving this bug open (with new title and severity).

2. The fact that the arrow keys are not enabled when the emacs option
is not set is also rather surprising: Being able to use the arrow keys
in a text editor is not specific to Emacs! This does not even seem to
be documented.

Actually, this is just because there is currently an issue in my
shell config files for the top-level shell (in this case, the
wrapper to emacs is not used by $VISUAL, but this was unintended).
#908227#24
Date:
2026-06-07 17:50:44 UTC
From:
To:
Hi Vincent,

Thanks for the report and for tracking down the cause.

This should be resolved in versions since 2022-02-01 and is included in
current version of ksh93u+m (1.0.10-4).

Here's the entry in the upstream change log:

Could you confirm in your setup? We can dig further if it's still broken.

Anuradha
#908227#31
Date:
2026-06-07 19:51:47 UTC
From:
To:
Hi Anuradha,

I have an old machine with old debs under /var/cache/apt/archives,
so that I could test old ksh93u+m versions. I confirm that this
bug still occurs in ksh93u+m 1.0.0~beta.2-1 (2021-12-06), but
no longer occurs in ksh93u+m 1.0.0~rc.1-1 (2022-07-30), and it
no longer occurs in the current version either.
#908227#36
Date:
2026-06-08 04:04:28 UTC
From:
To:
Version: 1.0.0~rc.1-1

That aligns with the release history, the fix first went into rc.1.

Thanks for testing,

Anuradha