#Make your terminal keys behave

To get a better keyboard experience on your terminal, map a few keys once. This is a good setup for other TUI apps as well.

Built in: Shift + arrows selects, y copies, esc dismisses. Opt + arrows jumps by word, Opt + Shift selects by word.

#WezTerm

Use wezterm@nightly (stable is frozen at 2024) and enable kitty keyboard so esc registers instantly in TUIs instead of lagging (known esc encoding bug):

config.enable_kitty_keyboard = true

brew install --cask wezterm@nightly

#Optional: nicer keys everywhere else

Not needed for crabcode — kitty already covers it. Recommended anyway for a good WezTerm experience in shells and other TUIs (Ctrl-A / Ctrl-E / Ctrl-U are readline standards for line start / end / delete to start; ALT-b/f for word jumps):

{ key = "LeftArrow", mods = "CMD", action = wezterm.action.SendKey({ key = "a", mods = "CTRL" }) },
{ key = "RightArrow", mods = "CMD", action = wezterm.action.SendKey({ key = "e", mods = "CTRL" }) },
{ key = "Backspace", mods = "CMD", action = wezterm.action.SendKey({ key = "u", mods = "CTRL" }) },

Ctrl-A / Ctrl-E can't carry Shift, so select via Shift + Home / End:

{ key = "LeftArrow", mods = "CMD|SHIFT", action = wezterm.action.SendKey({ key = "Home", mods = "SHIFT" }) },
{ key = "RightArrow", mods = "CMD|SHIFT", action = wezterm.action.SendKey({ key = "End", mods = "SHIFT" }) },

Word jumps for shells:

{ key = "LeftArrow", mods = "OPT", action = wezterm.action.SendKey({ key = "b", mods = "ALT" }) },
{ key = "RightArrow", mods = "OPT", action = wezterm.action.SendKey({ key = "f", mods = "ALT" }) },

#Ghostty

No config needed. Ghostty sends Cmd + Shift + arrows through as-is, so line selection works out of the box.

#Debugging keys

CRABCODE_KEY_TRACE=1 crabcode

Shows each key as a toast. Wrong modifiers = fix your terminal config, not crabcode.