Arrow keys stopped working in CLI

[StephaneDelcroix]

Description

Arrow keys stopped working during an interactive session. They output literal characters instead of navigating:

• Up arrow → A
• Down arrow → B
• Right arrow → C
• Left arrow → D

This suggests terminal escape sequences (^[[A, ^[[B, etc.) are not being interpreted correctly.

Environment

• Copilot CLI version: 0.0.402
• OS: macOS Tahoe 26.2
• Terminal: Terminal.app

Steps to reproduce

1. Use Copilot CLI in an interactive session
2. At some point during extended use, arrow keys stop responding

Expected behavior

Arrow keys should continue to work for navigation (history, cursor movement).

Actual behavior

Arrow keys output literal A/B/C/D characters.

Workaround

Unknown - may require restarting the CLI session.

[codeuh]

I'm also seeing this behavior in a Linux dev container when using VSCode's integrated terminal. My laptop is windows. Our organization doesn't like WSL2 so all container development is done on remote Linux servers. We configure VSCode to SSH to the remote Linux servers and build dev containers and use copilot CLI inside the containers. My dev container is built on Red Hat UBI 9 base.

The error reported in this issue happens immediately when launching copilot for me from the above-described development setup.

When I run copilot on windows in the terminal app, I don't see this happen.

Interestingly when I get a terminal into my dev container via the remote podman CLI on my windows laptop which is also configured to SSH to the remote dev server, the arrow keys work as expected. I'm running the remote podman CLI in the windows terminal app and it's configured to use the container engine on the same remote server. When I exec into the same dev container environment that doesn't work with VSCode's integrated terminal, it works just fine.

Image Description:
VSCode integrated terminal arrow keys don't work as expected.

Image Description:
Exec into exact same container from a windows terminal using remote podman CLI and arrow keys work.