BackwardKillWord bound to Escape,Backspace not working

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
55/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
csharp, powershell
Domain
cli

Research direction

Start by reproducing the Escape,Backspace chord and inspecting the behavior reported by Get-PSReadLineKeyHandler. Trace the key-handler and terminal input handling for Backspace, comparing it with the working Escape,Delete binding. Done means Escape,Backspace invokes BackwardKillWord and deletes the preceding word without breaking the other Escape bindings.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Needs-Triage :mag:
Prerequisites
Steps to reproduce

I believe this is a default KeyHandler, but ESC-Backspace is no longer working for me. The other handlers using Escape all seem to work (ESC-u and ESC-l to upper/lowercase a word, ESC-b and ESC-f to move forward/backword by word, ESC-d to forward kill a word, etc.). But ESC-Backspace just does ... nothing.

I set a new handler for 'Escape,Delete' to do a BackwardKillWord and that works, so it seems the problem is something with my Escape key.

My backspace in a normal terminal sends a Ctrl-H. It's been that way for years, but this stopped working a couple months ago.

Expected behavior
Pressing Escape,Backspace should delete the word before the current cursor location.
Actual behavior
Nothing happens.
Error details
No error is produced.
Environment data
PS> get-psReadLineKeyHandler -Chord "Escape,Backspace"

Basic editing functions
=======================

Key              Function         Description
---              --------         -----------
Escape,Backspace BackwardKillWord Move the text from the start of the current
                                  or previous word to the cursor to the kill
                                  ring
PS> $PSVersionTable

Name                           Value
----                           -----
PSVersion                      7.6.2
PSEdition                      Core
GitCommitId                    7.6.2
OS                             macOS 14.8.7
Platform                       Unix
PSCompatibleVersions           {1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0…}
PSRemotingProtocolVersion      2.4
SerializationVersion           1.1.0.1
WSManStackVersion              3.0
Visuals

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