Arch Linux

keggit

Member

Registered: 2025-05-03

Posts: 5

All my terminals no longer accept commands

terminal: kitty
window manager: hyprland

You'll have to forgive me for the lack of information because as the title says I have lost all ability to use my terminal. I believe it is a problem with zsh but I could be wrong. The issue persists through reboot and it will sometimes show the prompt but most of the time my terminal is just a blank screen. I am using kitty, and I would try a different terminal but I can't download anything for obvious reasons.

The issue is also on every other tty as well. when I try to type into the window the characters are displayed but there is no output when I press enter. pressing the backspace prints out the '^?' character sequence.

The even weirder thing is that since I am running hyprland, I have a few tui programs (yazi/btop for example) that run on launch. They launch fine through hyprland and operate normally in the terminal, all my gui programs launch and run as well through rofi. I have searched through the wiki but to be honest I am not sure what I even should be searching for here, the issue is so bizarre.

first time posting something here so sorry for etiquette issues.

keggit

Member

Registered: 2025-05-03

Posts: 5

Re: All my terminals no longer accept commands

I seem to be able to at least be able to view my /etc/profile and /etc/profile.d so I am going to start there for now

Edit: Looking into chrooting as well but its getting late for me so I'll deal with this tomorrow.

Last edited by keggit (2025-05-03 04:02:45)

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 65,355

Re: All my terminals no longer accept commands

when I try to type into the window

Do you have the same issue w/ the console (the DOS-like nongraphical login)?
Or when logging in as a different user (in doubt root. On the console)?
Do you export some bogus $TERM variable?

---

How to upload text · How to boot w/o GUI · Disable Windows Fast-Start! · Fix your xinitrc

keggit

Member

Registered: 2025-05-03

Posts: 5

Re: All my terminals no longer accept commands

I can login to any of the tty's just fine, but then the prompt never shows up and I can basically freetype but nothing actually goes through when I hit enter.

As for exported variables, I don't believe that would be the case as I don't have very many of those, and I have all of the same stuff done on my laptop which works fine. I also haven't changed any of my exports recently so I don't think it would be that.

here is everything I have exported anyway though:
export EDITOR=nvim
export VISUAL=nvim
export MANPAGER="nvim +Man!"

export PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/bin"
export PATH="$PATH:/home/keg/.local/share/gem/ruby/3.3.0/bin"
export GOPATH="$HOME/src"

export GPG_TTY=$TTY # this last one was made by zsh4humans

keggit

Member

Registered: 2025-05-03

Posts: 5

Re: All my terminals no longer accept commands

Didn't think to login as root though and it worked gonna try updating stuff to see if it fixes it.

Edit: updating fixed it I think, I should've waited for testing purposes, but I also uninstalled nordvpn as well because it was giving me similar issues earlier as well so that could've also been a fix.

Last edited by keggit (2025-05-03 06:53:02)

keggit

Member

Registered: 2025-05-03

Posts: 5

Re: All my terminals no longer accept commands

Thank you very much Seth I was panicking for a bit there. I suppose I should snoop through the Journal to see if I can figure out what the cause was. I'll update this thread for anyone else having this issue if I can figure it out.

spacemannn

Member

Registered: 2024-08-08

Posts: 10

Re: All my terminals no longer accept commands

I've seen this happen before with zsh/oh-my-zsh plugins that get stuck when initializing, causing the prompt to be extremely delayed in appearing. Might be worth turning off any customizations you may have configured in your ~/.zshrc , seeing if it gets better, and then reenabling them one at a time.