Passing escape sequences to shells within ansi-term in Emacs

In a regular terminal (e.g. iTerm2 on OS X) I can connect to a database, e.g. > psql .... and then, as I type my command in psql, e.g. $ select foo from bar I can move around (as I type psql commands) using the standard Alt+b and Alt+f. However, if I try to do this in a shell within Emacs (ansi-term), it doesn't work. More specifically, if I start a shell (e.g. Bash) within ansi-term, the keystrokes Alt+b and Alt+f work fine in the Unix shell (in this case, Bash), **BUT** if I then drop into psql from within the shell, the keystrokes Alt+b nor Alt+f stop working (the keystrokes won't move the cursor, and I can't keep typing commands properly anymore) Why is this? And how can fix this behavior? ## Update 1: I narrowed the problem and the line in my .zshrc that causes this behavior is the following one: TERM=xterm-256color I have this line because its's the best solution that I found to fix the problem that I report in this thread: Emacs multi-term not displaying special characters correctly ## Update 2 (solution, but why?): I found the solution in this thread: Weird character zsh in emacs terminal . As the top answer says, I had to create eterm-color terminfo by using following command: (note that the terminfo path may be different from your system) # If you use Cocoa Emacs or Carbon Emacs tic -o ~/.terminfo /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/Resources/etc/e/eterm-color.ti