EMACS ARROW KEYS NOT WORKING (PRODUCING [A], [B] INSTEAD)

			  By Dennis Katsonis
			    24 August 2025

If when running Emacs in a terminal, you are getting [B] when hitting
the down arrow, instead of the cursor moving down [A] when hitting the
up arrow, [D] when hitting left and [C] when pressing right, you may
be tempted to think the terminal is at fault.

You could indeed potentially fix it by changing the $TERM environment
variable to "xterm", and "tricking" the terminal into thinking it is
something that it is not.  This is not a good idea, as it may cause
other issues elsewhere.

This issue can be caused by improper key bindings set in Emacs.

(global-set-key (kbd "M-[") 'insert-pair) [B [B]]

The above keybinding which worked for older versions of Emacs, caused
the problem in Emacs version 30.1.

Also check other keybindings.  Note the "\C-cx" depiction of the
keybinding.  For example...

(global-set-key "\C-cl" 'org-store-link)
(global-set-key "\C-cc" 'org-capture)
(global-set-key "\C-ca" 'org-agenda)

Use the kbd function to convert the keys to the internal Emacs key
representation.  This might also be a source of issues.

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c l") 'org-store-link)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c c") 'org-capture)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c a") 'org-agenda)