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Fixing some critical keyboard shortcuts in OS X terminal

August 13, 2014

Here are some minor tweaks to default keyboard shortcuts in Apple Terminal.app and iTerm.

Keyboard option on a Mac

I like being able to switch from one tab to another using left and right arrows, and I prefer to keep consistent shortcuts so I updated the default ones in Terminal.app with those used in iTerm (e.g., ⌘ ➝ for next pane). Since Terminal.app uses system localization, labels are in French, and I have a hard time finding how to spell it correctly (because of the single quote).

The other one is for iTerm specifically: I deleted the ⌘ W shortcut to close a terminal session because when using Emacs I found it interfering with the standard C-c/C-v for copy/paste (and I just recently happened to lost a whole R session with 200 Mo of statistical modeling).

For Emacs I have the following in one of my Elisp config file:

(when (eq system-type 'darwin)
  (require 'exec-path-from-shell)
  (exec-path-from-shell-initialize)
  ;; (setq ns-function-modifier 'hyper)
  (setq mac-option-modifier nil)
  (setq mac-command-modifier 'meta))

(setq delete-by-moving-to-trash t
      trash-directory "~/.Trash/emacs")

This means that I can type M-x as ⌘ x or Esc-x.

See Also

» A modular configuration for Emacs » Common Lisp on Mavericks » GNU Emacs on OS X 10.7 » Emacs versus Textmate » Emacs Org-mode and literate programming