In Terminal I cannot type lowercase e If I open a Terminal window and I type the letter "e" (without quotes of course) it beeps and will not type the letter.  Every other letter works just fine in Terminal. Uppercase E works too.  Just the lowercase e doesn't.

In every other app on my computer lowercase e works without issue, so it's not a keyboard issue.

This started sometime in the last week.  I use Terminal a lot in my job and never has this been an issue.  I have rebooted (did not fix).  I have reset terminal (did not fix).

Since I do not know the exact date when this started, I am not sure if I made any changes or installed software.  I am trying to remove anything I have installed recently.

FYI I have tried to use the 3rd party iTerm2 and it does the same thing.

ALSO - if I paste in something with a lower e, it does same thing - will not take it.  It has to be some terminal bash config issue I would think. 

In fact, I copied the following sense and then I pasted it in Terminal. What appears?  sns and you can hear two beeps.  

Also - in case it is unclear - this happens with the built-in keyboard on the MBP as well as an external keyboard.  Based on that and the pasting issue, I do not think this is a physical keyboard issue in any way.

Specs: 2015 MacBook Pro, fully up to date OS X
Let's debug it.


Change shells and try again. (Credit to @Kent) In terminal: 


$(which zsh)

Comment out all lines in .bash_profile, .bashrc, etc. and open a new terminal tab/window. If this resolves the issue, something being loaded into the shell environment is consuming the letter e for reasons that science may never be able to explain.
Try cating a file that contains the letter e to see if it will even display: (Credit to @techraf)


Open a text editor (not terminal)
Enter some text with a few es and save file (foo.txt?)
In terminal, cat the file:


cd /path/to/folder; cat foo.txt

If es render then the terminal can handle it, if not, then this is super weird.

Try applescript. (Credit to @ALX)


Open Applescript editor
Create Applescript file with these contents:

delay 10
tell application "System Events" to keystroke "e"

Execute the script file and then quickly navigate to the terminal window. In a few seconds it will virtually press the e key and hopefully show up in your terminal. This would indicate that there could be an input/device driver issue (though I am clueless as to what that might be)



I'm not going to lie, I am absolutely fascinated by this issue and cannot wait to learn what the cause is. It's not hardware because it works in other applications, which means it's software and I cannot imagine who would swallow the letter e with code.