Some alt commands do not work on kitty terminal

[PurpleBooth]

Summary

The tutorial's intructions no longer work when you get down to section 5.5.

Note: ⌥+s prints a sharp s (ß, z.B. for straße or other german words) on a Mac keyboard.

Reproduction Steps

I tried this:

1. hx
2. :tutor

I expected this to happen:

To be able to complete the tutorial

Instead, this happened:

Splitting selection into new lines does nothing.

Helix log

~/.cache/helix/helix.log

cat $HOME/.cache/helix/helix.log [bat error]: '/Users/billie/.cache/helix/helix.log': No such file or directory (os error 2)

Platform

macOS (GB keyboard)

Terminal Emulator

kitty 0.26.3 created by Kovid Goyal

Helix Version

helix 22.08.1 (66276ce)

[Omnikar]

You'll need to configure your terminal emulator to use the option key as a modifier.

[PurpleBooth]

I am a little confused, what this means, could you explain further?

I enabled the key mapping printing in kitty +kitten show_key -m kitty, and I can see the correct events

Press any keys - Ctrl+C or Ctrl+D will terminate
ENTER RELEASE 
CSI 13 ; 1 : 3 u

Alt+LEFT_ALT PRESS 
CSI 57443 ; 3 u

Alt+s PRESS 
CSI 115 ; 3 u

Alt+s RELEASE 
CSI 115 ; 3 : 3 u

LEFT_ALT RELEASE 
CSI 57443 ; 1 : 3 u

[Omnikar]

I don't know how it works in kitty but in iTerm2 I had to change this option from "Normal".

[PurpleBooth]

Ah ok, kitty uses a different protocol to iterm, so this doesn't apply to kitty from my understanding

[Omnikar]

Oh, looks like you just need to set macos_option_as_alt in your kitty config to left, right, or both.

[PurpleBooth]

Ah done and that worked! Perfect!

[mikkelfj]

FWIW, new user: "MacOS Iterm2 + helix + alt + b" in insert mode inserts a symbol instead of moving back a word, Emacs style. Helix 0.22.