When you say "non-broken terminal program" are you talking about my
terminal emulator? In the SS I was running Terminator, but I have also
tried with gnome-terminal, urxvt, rxvt, xterm and aterm and the
problem persists.
Most of the rxvt family, including aterm, are known to not work properly. urxvt *should* work as should gnome-terminal. xterm might or might not depending on exact version.
Curiously lxterminal, Terminal (xfce terminal) and guake, vim covers
I believe lxterminal, Terminal, and gnome-terminal all are based on the same Gtk+ VTE widget and all should work the same way. (They are NOT based on xterm.)