What could cause the alt key to stop working in two terminal apps?

edit

Which alt key doesn't work? The left one or the right one?

[answering because i can't comment]

We have the same problem. In our case, it was an upgrade to Fedora 16 that caused this. You didn't by any chance update to Fedora 16 at some point, did you? Seems extraordinarily unlikely, but i have to ask.

We see this under GNOME 3 and Xfce.

We have noticed that we can still use the escape key to get these behaviours - escape then dot does the same as alt-dot. That's standard; composing with escape is the traditional way of sending a meta on keyboards which lack a meta key. Chording with alt should normally do the same, but doesn't.

Yup, the workaround is to downgrade to previous gtk2 and hold on with upgrading a bit until they fix the issue.

wget http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/gtk2/2.24.7/3.fc16/x86_64/gtk2-2.24.7-3.fc16.x86_64.rpm
wget http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/gtk2/2.24.7/3.fc16/x86_64/gtk2-devel-2.24.7-3.fc16.x86_64.rpm
sudo rpm -Uvh --force gtk2*rpm

For gtk3-based apps (such as gnome-terminal) in Fedora 16: the pending update for vte3 in updates-testing fixes this: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2011-17004/vte3-0.30.1-3.fc16

to fix simply run (as root):

yum --enablerepo=updates-testing install vte3

Note that this doesn't fix the gtk2-based apps like terminator