I prefer to use Emacs in a full-screen terminal window. One problem that has plagued me until today though has been the lack of proper Control and Meta arrow combinations when working at the terminal. Especially when working with [paredit](http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit which frequently involves the use of C-left, C-right, C-M-left, C-M-right and less frequently of M-up and M-down. To get paredit to work properly I kept switching to Cocoa Emacs (in case you didn’t know, you can install Cocoa emacs with brew install emacs --cocoa if you are using “homebrew) )
Today I decided to get to the bottom of this problem at any cost. First, I suspected that Control arrow combinations were not being sent properly by my terminal, in my case iTerm2. You can also fix this however for Terminal.app or the original iTerm.
Select Profiles > Open Profiles… from the menu bar, or press Command-O and take a look at the default profile. Click on the Keys section. While you are here verify you have Left Option and Right Option as +Esc. For the arrow key fixes though you will need to add a series of key shortcuts. The easiest way to get started is select Load Preset… > xterm Defaults.
This will map C-up, C-down, C-right, and C-left to send the following escape sequences:
C-up : Esc-[1;5A C-down : Esc-[1;5B C-right : Esc-[1;5C C-left : Esc-[1;5D
It will also define Shift arrows and Control-Shift arrows, but we don’t care about those at the moment. These are not quite sufficient, but before we go any futher, let’s make sure we can get these to work in Emacs.
Open up a new terminal window and then open emacs at the terminal with emacs -nw. Now, with paredit turned off, try C-left and C-right, which should most likely move a word at a time left and right respectively. To verify Emacs is picking up the correct keys you can also try C-h k for Describe key followed by the key combination. For example, C-h k C-left should display
<C-left> runs the command backward-word, which is an interactive
compiled Lisp function in `simple.el'.
It is bound to <C-left>, <M-left>, M-b, ESC <left>.
(backward-word &optional ARG)
Move backward until encountering the beginning of a word.
With argument ARG, do this that many times.
[back]
As long as TERM is set to xterm the above bindings should work automatically in Emacs. Should you have to define your own bindings for these escape sequences you could do so with
(define-key input-decode-map "\e[1;5A" [C-up])
(define-key input-decode-map "\e[1;5B" [C-down])
(define-key input-decode-map "\e[1;5C" [C-right])
(define-key input-decode-map "\e[1;5D" [C-left])
Note that input-decode-map is only defined starting with Emacs 23.
At this point you should have C-left working outside of paredit. Now turn on paredit mode (M-x paredit-mode) and try C-left and C-right again. Chances are you will see [1;5D and [1;5C. If this happens only in paredit mode, then the culprit is most likely the bidning of M-[. You can figure this out by trying describe key again. If you try C-h k C-left you will most likley see
M-[ runs the command paredit-bracket-wrap-sexp, which is an interactive Lisp function in `paredit.el'. It is bound to M-[. (paredit-bracket-wrap-sexp &optional N) Wrap a pair of bracket around a sexp M-[ (foo |bar baz) -> (foo [|bar] baz)
Huh?
Each time you press Control + left arrow the terminal will send the following sequence as defined above: ESC [ 1 ; 5 D. Emacs starts interpreting this sequence, but it gets an early match on ESC [ which is the same as M-[ and invokes paredit-bracket-wrap-sexp. We need to turn off this behavior, which we can do by putting the following in ~/.emacs
(require 'paredit)
(define-key paredit-mode-map (kbd "M-[") nil)
Once you load the above code, try C-left again in paredit. If that works, you are ready for the next step.
The xterm Defaults only provided us with certain key bindings. Go back to the profile key bindings under iTerm2 and add bindings for the following:
M-up : Esc-[1;4A M-down : Esc-[1;4B M-right : Esc-[1;4C M-left : Esc-[1;4D C-M-up : Esc-[1;8A C-M-down : Esc-[1;8B C-M-right : Esc-[1;8C C-M-left : Esc-[1;8D
To do this, click on the + sign, type the key sequence, then under Action: select Send Escape Sequence and type in the escape seequence starting with [1;. You can look as an example at the values for Control-left and friends that were added when you loaded the xterm Defaults map.
Why these values? I have no idea. I looked at the escape sequences for plain arrow keys, Shift-arrow keys and Control-arrow keys and I decided to experiment a little in the neighboring spaces, using C-h k to figure out which key sequence is bound to what I want. If you find a better explanation please let me know.
If you are using iTerm you can add key bindings as follows:
Bookmarks > Manage Profiles > Keyboard Profiles > xterm and under Key map settings: add (by clicking on the + sign)
Key: cursor left Modifier: Control Action: send escape sequence [1;5D
Add the remaining key bindings using the above format and the values from the iTerm2 table.
In Terminal.app you will need to add a few key bindings by going to Preferences > Settings > Keyboard. The end result will be the same as iTerm2 but the interface is slightly different.
Key: cursor left Modifier: Control Action: send string to shell \033[1;5D
where \033 represents Escape. For the other keys refer to the map for iTerm2 above.
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