MacOS user here. So many times over the last decade I’ve journeyed to get terminal Emacs working with my litany of weird keybindings. But I always end up back in the GUI.
I switched to Colemak about 15 years ago and thought it would be a good idea to rethink all my Emacs keybindings, since my muscle memory was shot in that transition. (I don’t recommend this in hindsight.)
I have yet to get a terminal working fully like the GUI. Partly because I refuse to install a third-party key mapper.
Anyway, just tried this and Alacritty. It’s the closest I’ve got to fully working. My guess is another hour of tweaking and I could maybe get all the way there.
Terminals can't send certain modified keys, something like M-S-;. What this thig does:
- Uniformly describes different key codes across different terminal emulators and platforms;
- Sends the codes which native platforms support, but the terminal protocol does not, via a custom prefix. It gets decoded on the Emacs side, and mapped back to a native-matching key code. You can press fancy keys and have a uniform reaction in Emacs, no matter if you're using a local graphical Emacs, or remote Emacs in a terminal.
I confirm, this is a great approach; I used a much simplified version of it with WezTerm and remote Emacs.
The intro gives Ctrl+1 and Ctrl+Shift+A as examples. If you tried configuring emacs keyboad shortcuts that won't work with your terminal then this software might help to make them configurable.
If you don't already have this problem it's not really relevant.
I switched to Colemak about 15 years ago and thought it would be a good idea to rethink all my Emacs keybindings, since my muscle memory was shot in that transition. (I don’t recommend this in hindsight.)
I have yet to get a terminal working fully like the GUI. Partly because I refuse to install a third-party key mapper.
Anyway, just tried this and Alacritty. It’s the closest I’ve got to fully working. My guess is another hour of tweaking and I could maybe get all the way there.
- Uniformly describes different key codes across different terminal emulators and platforms;
- Sends the codes which native platforms support, but the terminal protocol does not, via a custom prefix. It gets decoded on the Emacs side, and mapped back to a native-matching key code. You can press fancy keys and have a uniform reaction in Emacs, no matter if you're using a local graphical Emacs, or remote Emacs in a terminal.
I confirm, this is a great approach; I used a much simplified version of it with WezTerm and remote Emacs.
If you don't already have this problem it's not really relevant.