Freeing alt keys in your terminal

In my terminal, I have Option-C bound to fzf’s fuzzy cd. However, when I press this, I get ç typed instead of triggering the keybind. I thought this was a system-wide issue with my US keyboard, but a more elegant solution lies inside of your terminal’s settings!

Solution

Here is the fix for few terminal emulators that I know of.

Terminal.app #

Go to Settings > Profiles, and check the box, “Use Option as Meta key”.

Ghostyy #

By default, this behaviour is sane (who would want to input unicode??). If you do want to toggle this setting, setting the config option macos-option-as-alt to false will allow you to input special unicode characters with alt.

iTerm2 #

Go to Settings > Profiles, and click the dropdown next to Left option (⌥) key: and select “Esc+”. The same can be done for the right option key if needed. Keeping it normal would still allow you to input unicode into the terminal.