I often use org in emacs inside an xterm (because the emacs is running
on a machine far away and remote x emacs is piggy about bandwidth).

Several observations:

  keys like shift-up sometimes work I think local xterm is somehow
  making a keycode and sending it over ssh.  So it seems like in
  environments where there's a notion of 7-bit ASCII character sets and
  the 8th bit being available for meta, emacs tries to cope with that.

  I use no locale settings.  But on machines with LC_ALL=en_US.utf-8 or
  some such, I find that the meta key doesn't work in emacs any more (at
  least on remote logins)

  You can avoid all those keys and do things in org other ways.  I tend
  to c-c c-s and type a new date, rather than use arrows anyway.

  There is "(setq org-use-speed-commands t)" and then 'l' and 'r' on
  headings will demote/promote.  I like this because I don't have to
  remember if I'm in an environment where shift-arrow works.


(IMHO it's a bug in org that anything mainstream uses keystrokes that
are not available in a regular terminal.  Back when I was young, we
didn't have X, and had to carry our own VT52s to school. :-)