Move cursor word by word in Alacritty

Question

I recently started using Alacritty instead of the default Terminal.app on macOS. When using Terminal, I can jump word by word using Option with left and right arrow keys. In Alacritty this key combination is causing ;3D and ;2D to print to the screen instead of the cursor moving.

Is there a way configure Alacritty to jump word by word using Option and arrow keys?

Answer 1

With tmux and zsh, add these to the alacritty config:

key_bindings:
  ...
  - { key: Right, mods: Alt, chars: "\x1BF" }
  - { key: Left,  mods: Alt, chars: "\x1BB" }

Answer 2

Since alacritty 0.13.1, config in yaml format is no longer supported, and the current version of toml doesn't support \x1B. Instead, use \u001B.

Here is an equivalent example c.f. @cfstras's example. The config file should also be called config.toml instead of config.yml now.

[keyboard]
bindings = [
  { key = "Right", mods = "Alt", chars = "\u001BF" },
  { key = "Left",  mods = "Alt", chars = "\u001BB" },
]