Making Alt key work in ITerm on Mac

 

Making the Alt Key Work in iTerm2

iTerm2 is a replacement for the default Terminal application on MacOS. It has many more handy features than Terminal , is free to download and is also open source 🎉.

However, on first install, you can’t use the Option or Alt key (this key: ⌥) as you would in other applications: you can’t skip or jump over words by pressing Alt and the left or right keys. Instead you see sequences like [D or [C:

With a little config, you can change this behaviour, which I’ll explain below.

Note: I refer to the “Alt” key throughout this post, which is the text written on my old 2013 MacBook Pro keyboard, but this is normally called the “Option” key in MacOS.

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Open the “Preferences” menu: either find it in the “iTerm2” dropdown menu along the top of the screen or press the Cmd and comma keys. ⌘ + ,

Choose the “Profiles” menu.

Select the “Keys” tab.

Within the “Key Mappings” pane, find the mapping for the Alt and left keys, which will look like this: ⌥←. Double click it.

Change the action from “Send Hex Code” to “Send Escape Sequence” (you might have to scroll a bit to find this).

In the “Esc +” field, type lowercase “b” and click “OK”.

Open the same context menu for Alt plus right ⌥→ and again change the action to “Send Escape Sequence”.

This time, in the “Esc +” field, type lowercase “f”. Click “OK”.

Close the menu and begin using the Alt and the left/right arrows immediately. The cursor will now “jump” over entire words as it does on other applications. Your command line navigation will now be faster and more precise.