Nethack Ubuntu - CTRL-P for message history not working?

I installed nethack on ubuntu via the terminal using

sudo apt-get install nethack-common nethack-console

For some reason I can't use CTRL+P to display message history. I've tried putting on and off caps lock, tried CTRL+SHIFT+P, and even CTRL+ALT+P and nothing works. All it seems to detect is the SHIFT-P and asks me what I want to put on.

Best Answer

It turns out CTRL-P was in fact working, but not in the way I expected.

The tty version of nethack displays a list of recent messages on the right side of the screen when using the command - so this is what I was expecting it to do. However, The offline version simply repeats the last message (or the ones prior to it) at the top of the screen.

Because I was trying different CTRL, SHIFT, P combinations, I obviously used the put-on command ( SHIFT-P) at least once. Then when I tried CTRL-P, the command was doing its job by displaying a recent message but it looked like it was merely interpreting it as another put-on command. Of course, I realised my mistake when I did other actions in the game which displayed different messages and tried CTRL-P again.

EDIT: As hobbs pointed out, I hadn't set msg_window to ~~full~~ (alt.org usesreversed) and therefore wasn't getting the functionality I was used to when playing on the server.

I had to create a new configuration file, ~/.nethackrc with OPTIONS=msg_window:reversed and everything worked as expected.