Meta-modifier issue with Alacritty terminal under macOS

[spamwax]

Steps

• Use kak (2018.10.27) in Alacritty terminal on macOS to open a text document with parentheses (version 0.2.4)
• Make sure you have the following in your .alacritty.yml file to send correct Meta keycode (required in macOS)

  - { key: I,        mods: Alt,         chars: "\x1bi"                  }

• Place cursor inside the parentheses and try to select everything in it by using Meta+I followed by B

Outcome

Cursor moves one word back

Expected

Everything inside the parentheses should be selected

See following for the different behavior under Alacritty vs iTerm:

[Screwtapello]

If you run /bin/cat inside Alacritty and press Meta+i, what gets printed to the terminal?

[eraserhd]

@spamwax This is an Alacritty bug with a long and unfortunately storied history. It was introduced on Mac OS by an attempt to fix a different mapping issue on Mac OS. Nobody seems to want to touch it (and I don't blame them).

The issue is that Option-I works as a diacritic code, and Alacritty doesn't know how to disable that, so when you type Option-I, it sends ESC I correctly (this is what was fixed in the previous bug), but the following key is modified by adding an accent.

I have a nice work-around using Karabiner, with these rules: https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/complex_modifications/#alacritty

(I've also programmed my hardware keyboard to do this all the time.)

[eraserhd]

alacritty/alacritty#209 is the bug that was fixed which introduced this, IIRC.
alacritty/alacritty#1610 is the bug that I reported.

[spamwax]

@Screwtapello
Meta+I shows: ^[i but if I follow that by a B, it then shows ^[iˆb

@eraserhd Thanks for the hints about the bug & Karabine

[spamwax]

@eraserhd your karabiner solution doesn't work for me! which version of alacritty you are using and do you have any special key binds in your alacritty.yml?

[eraserhd]

@spamwax My alacritty.yml is here: https://github.com/eraserhd/dotfiles/blob/develop/alacritty/config/alacritty.symlink/alacritty.yml

I almost always run Kakoune under tmux inside Alacritty. My tmux.conf is in that repo as well.