Alt-N jump back doesn't work on MacOS

[conradludgate]

Macs don't have an alt key, and using Option-N doesn't work either.

[justinmcp]

This is something to set in your terminal emulator.

• for Terminal; Preferences > Profiles (Your profile) > Keyboard > "Use Option as Meta Key"
• for iTerm2; Preferences > Profiles (Your profile) > Keys > Left or Right Option Key setting > "esc+" (or "meta")

@conradludgate

[jucor]

@justinmcp iTerm2 doesn't give me that choice :/ Any other idea, please? [Edit: see below, PEBKAC, was looking in the wrong place]

[jucor]

Note: using "Option as Meta key" solves the issue in Terminal, thanks. Just can't find the equivalent in iTerm2 3.4.19.

[jucor]

OK, I'm a moron, I was looking in the wrong place in iTerm2. Thanks @justinmcp for your advice which was on point!

Would still be easier if atuin/crossterm recognized Option, but for now Meta will work :) (hoping this won't interfere with other apps :/ )

[ellie]

Oh awesome! Thank you for finding this! 🙌 Will see if we can also recognize Option

[jucor]

Dang, side-effect: remapping to Meta wrecks havoc with entering special characters in the terminal (e.g. in vim) :/ So recognising Option would be amazing :)

[mizlan]

Dang, side-effect: remapping to Meta wrecks havoc with entering special characters in the terminal (e.g. in vim) :/ So recognising Option would be amazing :)

This isn't the responsibility of Atuin but rather the terminal emulator

[zygous]

I was just playing with this, because it would be good to be able to use Alt-n. I use Kitty as my terminal emulator, so enabling the mapping was easy: just add macos_option_as_alt yes to its config file.

This worked beautifully! However, when I then went to type # in a file I found I couldn't: I'm using a British keyboard, so # is actually Option-3 (yes, for some reason, Apple still seems to think Brits type § and ± more often than #!)

This means mapping Option as Alt is not a solution for me; much as I'd like the Atuin shortcuts, being able to type # is far more important.

[zygous]

What issues might be caused by using Ctrl-n instead of Alt-n on Macs? I've created a PR that does this: #1106

[bitboxer]

Ideally this would be configurable.

[zygous]

Ideally this would be configurable.

Yes, but getting it working at all for Mac users solves the immediate problem. Making the keybindings configurable is a fair bit more work.

[ellie]

It needs to be configurable I'm afraid, as otherwise this will break it for all mac users who have reconfigured their setup

[zygous]

Yeah, fair enough. I was caught up with the idea that there wouldn't be any Mac users in that situation, because of the breakage I'd seen, but that's a terrible assumption.

I've updated my PR to honour a config setting -- ctrl_n_shortcuts -- instead of testing the OS. It was actually a lot less work than I anticipated 🙂

[ellie]

This is now supported via one of the following:

1. Enable ctrl_n_shortcuts to use ctrl instead of alt
2. Map option to alt, and accept any issues with the keyboard this may cause

See the docs for more! https://atuin.sh/docs/config#macos-ctrl-n-key-shortcuts