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I can bounce between apps in Chrome OS by pressing alt-N, where N is the position of my app on the status bar. Useful!

But when I'm in the bash shell of my Nitrous.io box, pressing alt-N to bounce to a different app gives bash a command: (arg: N).

What does the (arg: N) command do in bash? A five minute search taught me plenty of hotkeys, but none with alt + number key.

And can I disable it?

Dmitry Alexandrov
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Cody Hess
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  • They are [readline arguments](https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Readline-Arguments). [Here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/562115/press-alt-numeric-in-bash-and-you-get-arg-numeric-what-is-that) are some good explanations. – Pablo A May 01 '18 at 18:23
  • For anyone wanting to do this with Crostini, under the keyboard and mouse settings (for Terminal, not the general settings) you can enable the Alt + 1-9 keybinds – Radvylf Programs Aug 11 '21 at 21:11

1 Answers1

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You can remove them in an exactly same way as any other shortcut – with bind -r

for i in "-" {0..9}; do bind -r "\e$i"; done

If you hate loops, you may do it manually:

bind -r '\e-'
bind -r '\e0'
bind -r '\e1'
bind -r '\e2'
bind -r '\e3'
bind -r '\e4'
bind -r '\e5'
bind -r '\e6'
bind -r '\e7'
bind -r '\e8'
bind -r '\e9'

If you do not want this modifiers not only in Bash sessions but everywhere where GNU Readline provides them, add the following lines not in your .bashrc but in your .inputrc:

"\e-"
"\e0"
"\e1"
"\e2"
"\e3"
"\e4"
"\e5"
"\e6"
"\e7"
"\e8"
"\e9"

(Yes, just list them).

Dmitry Alexandrov
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  • This worked for me in my regular terminal, but for some reason has not worked in guake. I wonder is there some other config that needs or should I report it to the maintainers. – M1ke Jan 05 '17 at 10:17
  • This gives me `readline: ~/.inputrc: line 1: "\e-": no key sequence terminator`, and the same for all of the others. – Radvylf Programs Aug 11 '21 at 21:04