IDEA's terminal home/end/crtl+arrows don't work

Question

In IDEA's terminal I cannot use (tried with zsh - /usr/bin/zsh and bash - /bin/sh)

• Home, End - nothing happens when pressed nor
• Ctrl+arrow keys - get ABCD characters.

But these keys work in other terminals, like Treminator or Guake.

I'm using Ubuntu 16.04 and IDEA 2016.3 (same happened with previous versions of IDEA). And I have the same problem on different laptops with slightly different configuration.

Answer 1

Without some documentation from Idea on what to expect, it's just a terminal, which (like many) identifies itself as a "vt102" (and like many, that identification got there by cut/paste).

Now, a "vt102" had no Home or End key. Those happened later, on PC-keyboards. DEC's later model from the early 1980s, the vt220 introduced a similar-appearance editing keypad, with different names. There's some relevant discussion on that in the xterm FAQ Why doesn't my keypad work?

Likewise, a "vt102" had cursor-keys, but made no distinction whether you pressed control or shift. That came much later, in the late 1990s. Some of the history and timeline for this is in the xterm FAQ.

Finally (I could write a detailed review), it sets TERM to xterm-256color, but testing shows that doesn't work (it's a 16-color terminal).

Now, Treminator(sic) or Guake are basically the same terminal, using VTE. VTE's developers copied features (mostly from xterm), but there are other terminals which can behave differently, e.g., rxvt. There's no standard that says that Idea's terminal will match the behavior of xterm. If it were documented, there would be a good case for a bug report. However, the existing documentation doesn't give more than a simple guide to the menus for starting and stopping the embedded terminal:

• IntelliJ IDEA 2016.1 Help:: Terminal
• IntelliJ IDEA 2016.1 Help:: Working with Embedded Local Terminal