I am using Gnome Terminal 3.6.2 on Ubuntu 14.04. Things work fine if I am using the Terminal locally. However, when I ssh to another host, the left and right parenthesis "(" ")" (and so far only the left and right parenthesis) go nuts. When pressed, they auto-repeat until I hit another key. This happens about 90+% of the time. Sometimes they work correctly and sometimes no character shows up at all.

Note that this also happens if I ssh to user@localhost!

Note that when I ssh to the same remote host from Windows Putty I never see this problem.

Any ideas what's wrong and how to fix it? Is there some kind of hotkey or keyboard shortcut at work? Is it just a bug in Gnome Terminal?

have you tried it with another terminal?

Like what? I'm new to Ubuntu and GUI.

OK, I'm trying one call Terminator now. Will post back results.

Interesting. It does the same thing with Terminator. Ideas?

Just tried swapping keyboard. Also tried using Unity versus Cinnamon. Does the same thing.

So, this is not a function of the Terminal program, physical keyboard or desktop.

Anyone have any ideas?

The problem doesn't seem to be from the terminal emulator but I have no idea from where it could be...
Could you first try without ssh-ing to type bash --login and see if you experience similar results?

Then, go on ssh@localhost and try to type dash and see if there's a problem, then bash and see if there's a problem... ?

It's either one of these or the actual ssh client.. Also, what's your keyboard layout and language settings?

Just opening the Terminator program, and that's it, no ssh, no bash --login, I get the same problem. So, not related to ssh.

I am using x11vnc as the server on Ubuntu and TightVNC 2.7.10 as the viewer on Windows. So, maybe a TightVNC issue? I had a similar problem when trying UltraVNC View 1.2.0.6 on Windows. With UltraVNC the same behavior occurred with the Shift key. Sometime it worked, sometimes not, sometimes it acted as a caps lock.

I'll go back and play with UltraVNC and see if something funny happens with that.

OK, then at least try somewhere else... Open a GUI text editor and see if this is still a problem... If it is then it might be because of TightVNC

so it's a local problem and has nothing to do with remote connections?

i guess your bash is misconfigured.

to verify this, try and try to reproduce the problem locally & with ssh.

More testing - I tried with UltraVNC. I did not have the problem (but UltraVNC has its own problem: you have to hold the cap-lock key down for about 1 second or it doesn't "take". Likewise to un-caps-lock).

I went back to TightVNC and tried editing a file using gedit, same repeating parentheses problem. Next I tried LibreOffice, same thing.

Next I tried RealVNC reader. Did not have a problem with parenthesis!!! Yeah! Unfortunately, the CAP-LOCK key does not work AT ALL. I had to switch over to Windows to change the CAP-LOCK setting, then back to VNCviewer, then back to Windows to un-CAPS-LOCK.

So, it'd not bash, or Gnome Terminal, or Terminator terminal. The problem is VNCviewer. All viewers I tried have some kind of problem with the keyboard: Parentheses with TightVNC, caps-lock with UltraVNC and RealVNC.

This is very surprising considering how long these viewers have been around. My home Windows laptop is an up-to-date Windows 7 -- everything is quite vanilla.

I guess I'll go with the lesser of the evils and use TightVNC viewer for now. I'll have to live with the parentheses keys going nutz every so often. I cannot with with caps-lock keys not working.

Has anyone had similar experiences?

it seems that all this time you were talking about a remote connection into a linux machine?

Well, yes ... as I said in the first line of my posting: More experiments tomorrow ...

i took this to mean that you ssh from your gnome terminal, and thus from a linux installation.

I was probably not too clear in the beginning. I am connecting from a remote laptop that can dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu. If fact, I didn't even have the Ubuntu boot when I started this thread. From Ubuntu, I have no problem with any Terminal program, either opened locally on laptop, or using it to ssh to a remote Linux computer using the x11vnc server.

When booted as Windows, and I use TightVNC as the viewer to the same remote Linux host running x11vnc I get the problem described. I believe I've confirmed that it's not the terminal program. It's an issue with TightVNC. On the x11vnc server I've tried various options including -modtweak, -sloppykeys, -skip_dups and -norepeat. So for nothing is working to fix the problem.