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by Chris Snyder

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Dec
8th
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Keybindings in OSX Terminal

I have plenty of good things to say about the Leopard Terminal.app: love the tabs, love the “live” .term files, love the window groups. The combination of the three saves me a good five minutes every time I sit down to code.

But before any of it is useful, you have to clear out Apple’s non-shell-friendly default keybindings for end, home, page up, and page down. I was reminded of the “correct” settings by this post:

  • end: \033[4~
  • home: \033[1~
  • page down: \033[6~
  • page up: \033[5~

As a bonus brain-teaser, the Teminal developers decided not to tell us that the esc key produces \033 in the keybinding edit dialog. Trying to type the backslash results in \\033 which doesn’t work, eh.

Other Terminal.app tips:

  1. Delete sends Ctrl-H
  2. Declare terminal as xterm-color seems to fix scrolling problems in nano
  3. Use the visual bell; the audible bell is OBNOXIOUSLY LOUD
  4. Use utf-8 encoding throughout