Back in December of 2009, the top-of-file and end-of-file key combos in Midnight Command (MC) text editor stopped working when used in the GNOME terminal. I filed a bug at the Redhat bugzilla. What it boiled down to is that the MC developers changed the top-of-file and end-of-file key combos to new sequences and these new escape sequences triggered a long-standing bug in GNOME terminal, preventing the new key combos from working correctly. The result is that MC doesn't work in GNOME any more, at least in the default configuration shipped with common distros like Fedora.

A detailed series of posts explaining how to reproduce the problem and what's involved can be found in the Redhat bugzilla bug # 551062:

 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=551062

I also filed a bug with the Midnight Commander project back in 2009 which was closed as "invalid" because the new MC code still uses valid terminal escape sequences, it's just that GNOME vte has a bug which prevents the new sequences from working right:

 https://www.midnight-commander.org/ticket/1938

Further, several people pointed out that the GNOME vte bug underlying this problem was actually reported back in 2009 as well and it appeared as if someone might look into but apparently lost interest:

 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=600659


As far as I can tell there are three ways to fix this problem, two of which could probably be done in under 10 minutes by a developer:

1. Redhat/Fedora could adjust the MC config file to use the old key combos that avoid the GNOME vte bug.

2. The MC developers could go back to the old key combos used prior to 2009 which didn't trigger the GNOME vte bug. 

3. The GNOME developers could actually fix the bug in vte. 

After 3 years, Redhat has shown no inclination to update the MC config file to work around the GNOME terminal bug, so option #1 is out. And the MC guys absolutely refuse to switch the key combos back to the ones that worked with GNOME, so option #2 is out. That leaves option #3, actually fixing GNOME terminal, so I'm filing a bug here.

I don't care who changes what as long as we can get MC working on GNOME again. It would be great to think about the user experience ahead of programmer politics.