It's a missing ncurses feature in the older PuTTY that's trigged by an update to ncurses or terminfo in CentOS 8. PuTTY 0.72 added support for the REP (repeating character) command and the newer terminfo adds that as an xterm feature. The Epsilon author spotted it in the PuTTY changelog. So any curses app that uses repeating characters will have this problem when used with an old PuTTY version. Here's an example of someone running into this with iptraf-ng on Arch Linux a couple years ago: <https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/394787/linux-terminal-skipping-some-repeating-whitespace-characters>