I noticed that iTerm2 offers the very convenient feature of using "Option key as +ESC" (or as meta, but apparently that's obsolete).
I tried them both and the option key works as expected in Bash (set -o emacs
mode) and Emacs, but not in Vim. Thus, I can't make use of any "M-" bindings.
What I've found is that:
"M-" mappings work perfectly in MacVim (7.3.53), but that's outside of a console and not in the scope of this question.
I'm interested in how to make those mappings work in Vim, under iTerm2 or Terminal.
My specs:
I've downloaded the latest iTerm2 and tried to see what it sent to/what was printed by Vim (i<C-v><M-a>
) with the following settings:
Option as Option:
Vim prints æ
which is normal and expected on my french keyboard
Option as Meta:
Vim stays there, waiting for something to happen. Nothing is printed. If I press Option and a
in sequence I just obtain a
. Pressing Option and a
in some random order may print á
, which is weird and totally unexpected.
Option as +ESC:
Vim prints ^[a
which means "Escape character followed by the character a".
From these tests it appears that Vim will never ever receive <M->
without some hypothetical black magic.
If you stick with "Option as +ESC", it seems that you will have to change all your custom <M-something>
mappings to <Esc>something
. This may work but it will make writing any kind of prose in any non-english language a pain.
What I do: I leave the Option key as it is so that I can type characters like œ…«»
easily and I use <Leader>
(mapped to ,
, see :help mapleader
) for all my custom mappings.
Some people here like to reserve it for plugins and advocate a somewhat simpler and potentially safer approach.
inoremap <leader>, <C-x><C-o> "my way (copied elsewhere)
inoremap ,, <C-x><C-o> "another way
I left my option key to act as Normal and discovered that Vim saw them as <T-
bindings. So, for example, I have this mapping setup in my .vimrc to move to the end of a word when in Insert mode:
noremap! <T-Right> <C-o><Right>;
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