Comment 2 for bug 1566437

The behavior you describe happens when the terminal switches to the so-called "alternate screen" upon encountering a certain escape sequence that is printed by your application. Usually fullscreen applications (such as the "mc" file manager, "less" pager, text editors etc.) use this mode.

If it gets stuck in this mode at your shell prompt, it means that your application did not exit cleanly and left the terminal in this mode. Execute the "reset" command to get out of this situation.