Not sure what exactly is the cause, but many cli apps that use escape codes to present a console ui (not sure if curses only or in general) can crash/exit at a point that will break input, for example, forcing fish_config and descendents to quit while w3m is running results in breakage of the up/down/right/left arrow keys (pressing up results in [A posted to the console, down in [B, etc.)

tput init does not help.