Ctrl-p and Ctrl-n behaving unexpectedly under Docker

Question

For the life of me I can\'t seem to figure out why ctrl-p and ctrl-n don\'t work like they\'re supposed to under the Docker images I

Answer 1

It looks like this has been removed (or moved) in the Docs, but it used to live here: https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/attach/

Edit: It looks like they reference the below in the Configuration Files documentation.

The command sequence to detach from a docker container is ctrl-p ctrl-q, which is why ctrl-p doesn't work as expected. When you hit ctrl-p, docker is waiting on ctrl-q, so nothing happens.

You can use the new --detach-keys argument to docker run to override this sequence to be something other than ctrl-p:

docker run -ti --detach-keys="ctrl-@" ubuntu:14.04 bash

$# ls
$# <--- Ctrl-P here will display ls now
$# <--- Ctrl-@ here will detach from the running container

If you want, you can add this to your ~/.docker/config.json file to persist this change:

{
    ...
    "detachKeys": "ctrl-@",
    ...
}

More details on this can be found here: https://github.com/docker/docker/pull/15666 as I can't find it in the docs anymore.