Terminal showing “^[OA” when up arrow (↑) is pressed

Question

The up arrow in the terminal should bring up the previous command. My terminal (including iTerm2 and Intellij IDEA terminal) shows ^[OA when I press the up arrow (↑).

If I press return, the previous command is still executed. It works fine and I can see the command if I press CTRL+C first.

Answer 1

In a regular bash terminal this behavior happens when you’re in “keypad mode”. You are able to run echo -ne "\033[?1l" to reset back to ANSI mode.