macOS tips

alt key

By default, the Alt-key doesn’t work in macOS Terminal. Today I found a simple solution for this problem: Terminal > Preferences > Settings > Keyboard Just check ‘Use option as meta key’ at the bottom and you’re good to go

• Remi Bergma

For iTerm2, you can set the option key as meta by going to iTerm > Preferences > Profile > (Active Profile) > Keys and you can see at the bottom of the pane there are radio choices for the options keys. Use +Esc to properly bind as the Alt-key.

For kitty, see https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf.html#opt-kitty.macos_option_as_alt.

For ghostty, add macos-option-as-alt=true to your config. see https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#macos-option-as-alt

Performance

The versions of find, grep, etc that are shipped with OSX by default are slower than their GNU counterparts. You can improve startup time and performance by installing the GNU versions of coreutils, find, grep, and sed from Homebrew and prepending the following to your PATH when launching Kakoune:

/opt/homebrew/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin
/opt/homebrew/opt/grep/libexec/gnubin
/opt/homebrew/opt/gnu-sed/libexec/gnubin
/opt/homebrew/opt/findutils/libexec/gnubin

See also

Setting up Kakoune on a Mac