Alt-Enter in file picker does nothing

[jose-elias-alvarez]

Summary

The Alt-Enter picker keybinding added in #4435 does not work for me on macOS, independent of which terminal emulator I'm using. (I'm unsure if the issue is macOS-specific, but other reports seem to indicate that it works on other platforms.) Instead of opening the selected file in the background, the keybinding does nothing.

This issue differs from #2280 / other macOS Alt-related issues I've found in that I can confirm that I've properly configured my terminal emulator to treat the Option key as Alt. I've tested Helix on Terminal.app, iTerm, WezTerm, Kitty, Ghostty, and Warp and have seen the same behavior across all of them. I can also confirm that the terminal is receiving the correct keys:

All other Alt key bindings do work in Helix, and if I manually set up an A-ret keybinding for normal or insert mode in my Helix config, it also works, indicating that Helix is receiving the correct keys outside of the picker (I've also tested the same in Neovim).

Finally, I also tried building Helix using brew install --HEAD helix and still saw the issue.

Reproduction Steps

I tried this:

1. hx
2. Open file picker with <Space>f
3. Select a file and press Alt-Enter

I expected this to happen:

The selected file is opened in the background, as per #4435.

Instead, this happened:

Nothing happens.

Helix log

There's nothing relevant in the log, but here it is (I cleared it before running the reproduction steps above):

~/.cache/helix/helix.log

2025-01-03T13:56:10.319 helix_lsp::transport [ERROR] bash-language-server err <- "(node:78283) [DEP0040] DeprecationWarning: The `punycode` module is deprecated. Please use a userland alternative instead.\n"
2025-01-03T13:56:10.319 helix_lsp::transport [ERROR] bash-language-server err <- "(Use `node --trace-deprecation ...` to show where the warning was created)\n"

Platform

macOS Sequoia 15.2

Terminal Emulator

iTerm 3.5.11 (but as mentioned I replicated the issue on just about every macOS terminal emulator)

Installation Method

brew

Helix Version

helix 24.7 (079f544)