FreeBSD bash history: can't access last symbol of command

Question

There's an old server I am working with, runs modified FreeBSD 6.1 with bash 2.05b.0(1)-release.

On 'up' key press the last command from history pops up - but I can't access the last symbol, like the string is actually one character shorter than it's displayed. Therefore backspace is useless, and delete just mangles the last few characters.

Terminal is the 'terminator' with the following compatibility options:

• Backspace key generates: Control-H
• Delete key generates: Escape sequence

I was wondering if this was the normal behaviour of this version of bash, or some sort of misconfiguration / terminal compatibility problem.

Bash options are as follows:

# set -o
allexport       off
braceexpand     on
emacs           off
errexit         off
hashall         on
histexpand      on
history         on
ignoreeof       off
interactive-comments    on
keyword         off
monitor         on
noclobber       off
noexec          off
noglob          off
nolog           off
notify          off
nounset         off
onecmd          off
physical        off
posix           off
privileged      off
verbose         off
vi              on
xtrace          off

Answer 1

Turns out vi-mode was enabled in .inputrc for every user on the system. It does behave a bit different from vi-mode in zsh that I'm used to though - meaning 1) on 'up' it enters the command mode immediately and 2) it takes double-tap of 'a' or 'i' to enter the insert mode.