It seems this bug was fixed properly by readline in version 6.3; rl_initialize won't put meta codes on the screen. Frankly, I'm surprised distros like Fedora haven't upgraded or patched readline themselves to fix this. Aren't other programs affected? Turning off "enable-meta-key" isn't great, since it doesn't work on older readline or libedit, and is probably technically a backwards compatibility problem. I think the best solution would be not call rl_initialize during the initialization of the readline module, but I'm not sure if that could create compatibility problems.