"alt" maps to AltGr on MacOS, which interferes with typing åäö using eurkey #206

Noticed this when I tried to type an "å" and nothing happened: turns out "alt-w" was mapped to "copy" in my keymap, and Gram maps "alt" to "altgr".

There are several upstream issues regarding this, but no attempt to resolve it as far as I can tell:

• https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/22076
• https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/25469
• https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/12678
• https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12708
• https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/52592
• https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/52413
• https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/12811
• https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/14319
• https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/14053

Yay! It was annoying to have to disable all of these bindings :)

I tried this out in 2.0 and I am no longer able to use ⌥ ← and ⌥ → to move word-by-word or ⌥ ⌫ to delete a word. I think this may have been what broke that.

Curiously, ⌥ ↑ and ⌥ ↓ still works for moving lines.

Hm. Yeah, could be. Maybe they send ascii codes. I can refine the check there a bit, probably.

Will try it myself and see if I can work it out as soon as I have time.

@kramo So, the alt+arrow keybinds still work for me, but I suspect that you're on Linux? This fix is for Mac only.. but I wonder if maybe there is another dependency upgrade that may have caused issues on Linux.

What happens if you go to the keybind editor and search by keystroke?

I'm on macOS and it's borked for me on both major English (US or ABC) layouts. It's broken with an empty keymap as well.

Also broken with both ⌥ keys

Hm, I see. I wonder why it works for me. I would have thought MacOS to be more predictable :D

Does it work for you on an English layout?

I use Eurkey layout, will need to test with others and see..

I think I have a better way to solve this, but there is also a lot of strange language-specific code in there that I don't quite understand. I looked at the alacritty code and saw that there is a way to actually detect altgr/right option, so I will try that to see if that works.

OK yes, tested to work here at least as well as the previous fix at least. I think this should solve the issue. Just need to make sure I haven't broken the Linux build.

@kramo Please try this version and see if it works for you:

https://ziranpub.b-cdn.net/Gram-test-bug-206-aarch64.dmg

It unfortunately still doesn't work. It has the same behavior.

It's weird that you cannot reproduce the original issue, though. I'm not sure what could be different in our setups. I'm using a fairly standard macOS install, certainly nothing that interferes with input.

Do you have any key mappings that might interfere perhaps?

I have tried with Eurkey, US English and Swedish, and it works for me with all of them on both my desktop and laptop. 😖

I changed no bindings, so I have no idea... I should try on another device.

Yeah I'm at a loss. I don't understand what could be different, other than some setting or keybinding. I have tried with both Seqoia and Tahoe, and both external and laptop keyboards. Works every time for me.

Oh actually, maybe that's it. Which base keymap do you have configured? The default base keymap is one of the things that I changed in this version, from Emacs to VS Code (because I kept getting people coming from VS Code and being confused).

I tried with both Emacs and VS Code and no luck. I will try on a new device now. Or rather, @monster will try on her laptop :)

I can reproduce it being borked on my device, with the default keymap.

Do you both have the same "native" language on your laptops (ie. which language is the physical keybed)? I am wondering if one of Zeds weird language-specific hacks is affecting you but not me.

Mine is US, hers is Dutch.

Oh I think I’ve figured it out. I’m just a big idiot. You are using the right option key, am I right?

In my brain that’s not even an option key, on a swedish keyboard it’s a dead key / third level key. So I’ve never even tried to use it as a modifier. My concern was just not interfering with the left option key.

Anyway, IF I’m correct this should be really easy to fix.

Yeah, no, sorry, neither option key works :(

Hm. That’s too bad. Worst case it’s not related to this change at all and I’m looking in the wrong place entirely.

Once I have time (and if you have the patience to keep testing for me) I will make a version that lets you turn this on and off. I can make it more precise about when to prefer character input too.. but I just don’t understand why it would work for me and not either of you. It must be some setting or something..

@kramo Hi, please try this one when you have time: https://ziranpub.b-cdn.net/Gram-aarch64-altgr-attempt-2.dmg

No luck :(

I'm also not even sure this is what broke it. In any case, it would be nice for you to somehow be able to reproduce it, because this is really odd.

Ok, um, weird observation: control + left option works and behaves as if I just pressed option (pre 2.0), but control + right option also does nothing. So there is some difference. I don't know how relevant this is, though.

Huh. I really have no theory as to what is going wrong at this point. :/

Worst case it’s not related to this change at all and I’m looking in the wrong place entirely.

I took the liberty of doing a git bisect to make sure we're looking at the right commit, and after an hour of compiling and running out of storage, it did come to the conclusion of f50c5f287d.

I will make this an option and add logging to see if I can make sense of it. For some reason alt+arrows/del is producing alphabetic characters on your machines but not on mine. Maybe there’s an OS-level option that differs..

@kramo @monster Making it an option turned out to be a pain, but I did realize that there are two code paths. I was only updating one of them. So I have yet another attempt at fixing this for you:

https://ziranpub.b-cdn.net/Gram-aarch64-altgr-attempt-3.dmg

That seems to work :)

Aw yes!

I installed 2.0 this morning and this was about to drive me nuts! The fixed version works for me 👍.

https://ziranpub.b-cdn.net/Gram-aarch64-altgr-attempt-3.dmg

I tried this version but with the default keymap "right option + delete" to erase a word doesn't work (left option works).

Some extra information in case it helps: I'm on an M1 MacBook Air running macOS 26.4.1. The keyboard looks like this. The input source is "ABC".

@ud2 wrote in #206 (comment):

https://ziranpub.b-cdn.net/Gram-aarch64-altgr-attempt-3.dmg

I tried this version but with the default keymap "right option + delete" to erase a word doesn't work (left option works).

Some extra information in case it helps: I'm on an M1 MacBook Air running macOS 26.4.1. The keyboard looks like this. The input source is "ABC".

I'm adding an option to treat both option keys as alt, even when the right one produces text input. I saw that Alacritty also has this setting, so I guess it's not a trivial problem to solve.

OK option added, hopefully this should make it work for everyone :)