I'm hesitant to even post this question as I'm sure it must be something simple but looking around I can't see how gnome-terminal would remap keys where xterm and a "real" terminal (ctrl+atl+F1) would not (they all load bashrc etc.) I also checked to see if the symptoms were present with other shells (ksh) and that doesn't change anything.
"a" works fine in other applications and also I ran showkey --scancodes and 'a' actually returns "0x1e 0x9e" which I think is "a down" "a up" so all seems well with the keyboard itself.
At this point I don't know what's causing gnome terminal to interpret "a" any differently than other applications. Does it have a key map of its own?
Update:
Raphael - font: Checked on the font used, it's not customized so I'm using whatever the terminal defaults to
Terdon: Hanging my head in shame... It was indeed a shortcut! Considering I hadn't customized anything, is there a way for this to be done w/o actually going through preferences? However curious the source of the problem, it does fix things. Thanks for taking the time to reply!
showkeys
ingnome-terminal
or another terminal emulator? My guess is that you've madea
a shortcut for something. Go to edit -> preferences -> shortcuts. Isa
mapped to anything?