I want to be able to use Option-left and Option-right to skip words (and Cmd-left/right to go to beginning and end of lines) within Vim as it does at my shell prompt. My Iterm2 preferences have mappings to do this (e.g. Option-left
to Esc-H
and a one for option-right
to Esc-F
to skip over words), and this works in the shell locally or when ssh'd to a remote server.
When I use Vim locally or remotely, option-left
works, but option-right
does not. I suspect this is because Vim naturally listens for Esc-H
, but not Esc-F
. I am able to get around this by modifying .vimrc file to Esc-b
to b
and Esc-f
to f
, but I don't want to do this to every server I'm connecting to.
Similarly, I have the same desired setup for Cmd-left/right for going to beginning and end of a line. I can get this working in the shell via Iterm2 mappings (e.g. Cmd-left
to Esc-[h
), but Vim doesn't respond at all to this unless I map keys again (e.g. Esc-[h
to ^
).
Update: I just figured out how to get option-left/right working. I changed mapping in iTerm2 for these to be escape-[1;5D
and escape-[1;5C
respectively. I still want to solve the Cmd-left/right problem though (I changed my question's title to reflect this). Any ideas?
I don't have MacOS, so I cannot exactly know your situation, but I recognize the problem from other OSes.
Basically, it would mean that the terminal sends keycodes that aren't understood by vim. I fixed it in the past by doing
before invoking vim
E.g. in order to get all keys and syntax highlighting working on AIX 5.3 across Putty/screen, I needed to use
There is a list of builtin terminal types if you pass a bad TERM
To mimic OS X's behavior of sending
Cmd-left/right
to the beginning/end of a line, I add the following mappings in iTerm2:Cmd-left
to escape-sequence[1~
Cmd-right
to escape-sequence[4~
To mimic OS X's behavior of sending
Option-left/right
to the previous/next word, I add the following mappings in iTerm2:Option-left
to escape-sequence[1;5D
Option-right
to escape-sequence[1;5C
Special thanks to this blog post for tracking down what I was missing with the
cmd-left/right
mappingsFWIW, dolan's answer didn't work for me on iTerm 2 1.0.0.20120203 on Mac OS X 10.7.3. His solution only inserted
~
and5D
/5C
into my terminal when I pressed the shortcut keys.Instead, I used the following solutions:
Cmd-left/right
: iTerm 2: How to set keyboard shortcuts to jump to beginning/end of line?Option-left/right
as well asoption-delete
: http://hackaddict.blogspot.co.at/2007/07/skip-to-next-or-previous-word-in-iterm.htmlYMMV, not sure why one set of solutions would work and not the other