Sublime Forum

OSX alt key bindings inserts symbols

#1

According to the docs http://sublimetext.info/docs/en/reference/key_bindings.html?highlight=alt

What happens by default with alt-alphanum is that a symbol is inserted. While this is the default OSX text field behavior, it’d be nice if it could be disabled so that more unix-like or emacs-like commands could be used. For example, alt-b (backwards word), and alt-f (forwards-word)

Is there a plugin workaround to this, or planned feature in future releases?

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#2

There’s nothing that can be done on Sublime Text’s side of things. This has to do with Apple taking control of alt keybindings. I don’t know of anyway to disable those keybindings, but you can go digging around.

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#3

Feel free to bind them to whatever you wish, the recommendation is simply that plugins shouldn’t bind to them by default

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#4

@C0D312 I’m not sure how iTerm or Terminal handles it, but they override the Cocoa text system and allow alt- to work without inserting a symbol.

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#5

Just to be clear: alt+char will only inset a symbol if it’s not bound to any thing. If you make a key binding, that key binding will be run, and no character will be inserted.

The original poster is asking for something that already exists.

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#6

[quote=“jps”]Just to be clear: alt+char will only inset a symbol if it’s not bound to any thing. If you make a key binding, that key binding will be run, and no character will be inserted.

The original poster is asking for something that already exists.[/quote]

Whoops. I should probably stop making up wrong information. :smile: What I meant to say is there is no way in OSX to turn off alt+[key]. But yeah, you can bind stuff to them. Sorry…

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