Passing command keys to Neovim

[notahat]

Hi folks.

Congratulations on the 1.0 release, and thanks for all the hard work that has obviously gone into it. Looks really great so far! The performance, the sensible default config, and the quality font rendering are all impressive.

This post is a feature request for a thing I use in Kitty that (I think) Ghostty can't do right now: passing Mac command keys through to Neovim, but only when Neovim is open.

This is particularly useful for making command-X, command-C, and command-V work with the system clipboard in both the shell and Neovim.

(To be clear: I'm pretty sure I can configure Ghostty to always pass Command keys through by removing the built-in keybinds for them. It's the doing it only when Neovim is open that I think Ghostty can't do currently.)

I realise this might be a niche feature, but it at least aligns with Ghostty's goal of providing a rich set of terminal features, and might be something that wasn't on your radar before. ❤️

---

So how does Kitty handle this?

The Kitty docs have the recipe, but I'll describe my setup here for reference:

First, I get Neovim to tell Kitty when it's open in my Neovim config:

vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd({ "VimEnter", "VimResume" }, {
  group = vim.api.nvim_create_augroup("KittySetVarVimEnter", { clear = true }),
  callback = function()
    io.stdout:write("\x1b]1337;SetUserVar=in_editor=MQo\007")
  end,
})

vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd({ "VimLeave", "VimSuspend" }, {
  group = vim.api.nvim_create_augroup("KittyUnsetVarVimLeave", { clear = true }),
  callback = function()
    io.stdout:write("\x1b]1337;SetUserVar=in_editor\007")
  end,
})

Then I tell Kitty to not handle the keys I want to pass through when in_editor is set by doing this in kitty.conf:

map --when-focus-on var:in_editor cmd+c
map --when-focus-on var:in_editor cmd+v
map --when-focus-on var:in_editor cmd+x

Then I can set up Neovim key mappings like this:

vim.keymap.set("x", "<d-x>", '"*d', { desc = "Cut to system clipboard" })
vim.keymap.set("x", "<d-c>", '"*ygv', { desc = "Copy to system clipboard" })
vim.keymap.set({ "n", "x" }, "<d-v>", '"*p', { desc = "Paste from system clipboard" })
vim.keymap.set("i", "<d-v>", '<esc>"*pa', { desc = "Paste from system clipboard" })
vim.keymap.set("c", "<d-v>", "<c-R>*", { desc = "Paste from system clipboard" })

[rhodes-b]

Ghostty plans on being configurable by the command line but as is this is currently not possible.
#2872
above seems related, not sure if there are any other discussions on the topic (but I do know that this is planned for sure)