ncurses to external shell and back messing with keys

Question

I have this ncurses application that is doing the standard recipe for temporarily dropping out of ncurses, running an external editor/shell/whatever, and then dropping back

Answer 1

After rootling around a bit, I found a cargo culting solution: explicitly call keypad(1) after getting out the shell on stdscr. I have no idea why this works, but it does. I'll mark someone else's answer as yes if they can explain why. The current working theory is that keypad touches some sort of internal buffer and clears it.

Scratch that:

NCURSES_EXPORT(int)
keypad(WINDOW *win, bool flag)
{
    T((T_CALLED("keypad(%p,%d)"), win, flag));

    if (win) {
        win->_use_keypad = flag;
        returnCode(_nc_keypad(SP, flag));
    } else
        returnCode(ERR);
}