Problems with Ctrl-[ usage in 0.58.0

[serranomorante]

Describe the bug

Pressing Ctrl-[ no longer works as <esc> on some panels like N2, N3, etc.

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Open lazygit
2. Press Ctrl-[

Expected behavior

It should work as escape but it changes tabs instead

Version info:

• commit=v0.58.0, build date=2026-01-03T19:33:53Z, build source=binaryRelease, version=0.58.0, os=linux, arch=amd64, git version=2.52.0
• git version 2.52.0

Additional context

This used to work just fine.

Note

Please try updating to the latest version or manually building the latest master to see if the issue still occurs.

[eureka0928]

@stefanhaller nice to meet you
This is nice cli, may I pick up this ticket?

[stefanhaller]

may I pick up this ticket?

No, this doesn't make much sense to me. I want to address this problem as part of a complete revamp of our key handling, and adding patches to the current code to make this work again doesn't feel useful to me. See also #5149 (comment).

BTW, this revamp will not make it work in the sense that @serranomorante wants: the fact that ctrl-[ used to work as a synonym for esc is a quirk of the legacy terminal protocol, this is no longer going to be supported. In the future, c-[ and esc are going to be distinct keys that can be mapped separately.

[serranomorante]

Hi @stefanhaller thanks. Does that means in the future I will be able to map c-[ in a way that lazygit can interpret that as escape? Something like c-[: <esc>?

[stefanhaller]

No, you will just be able to use it instead of esc, e.g.

keybinding:
  universal:
    return: <c-[>

Not sure this would be acceptable.

The wish to assign multiple keys to a single command would be an unrelated feature request, I think this came up before.

[serranomorante]

No, you will just be able to use it instead of esc, e.g.

keybinding:
universal:
return: <c-[>
Not sure this would be acceptable.

The wish to assign multiple keys to a single command would be an unrelated feature request, I think this came up before.

return: <c-[> would work for me, thanks! 👍

[eureka0928]

Hi @stefanhaller
I’d love to contribute to this CLI project—are there any issues that would be a good fit for me to pick up?

[stefanhaller]

@serranomorante The keybinding revamp has been merged to master in #5563, so I think we can close this.

In the future I also plan to make it possible to list several alternative bindings for each command, so you could then map universal.return to <ctrl+[> and <esc>; but it might take a bit longer.