Typing emdash and other symbols on macOS

[peterldowns]

Hey, huge fan, love it, thank you, etc. One small question about text handling: on macOS, I'm used to being able to type Shift+alt+minus to type a literal emdash character —. And Alt+j for ∆. There are a variety of these built-in keybinds that work everywhere I edit text, across the entire OS. Except, they do not work in Ghostty.

Adding an explicit keybind setting to my config does allow me to type these characters. For instance, here's how to re-enable typing an emdash:

keybind = shift+alt+minus=text:—

Is this expected behavior? It's not that big of a deal for me — I mostly just use emdashes and endashes, and setting up the shortcuts isn't too onerous — but I want to check how intentional this behavior is.

There is a related discussion entry about macOS control key input but I am not sure that it's discussing the same thing: #2934

[mitchellh]

Does this resolve the issue? https://ghostty.org/docs/config/reference#macos-option-as-alt

[peterldowns]

Yes, setting macos-option-as-alt = false perfectly fixes the issue I've described. I'm sorry for not having seen that in the config references; thank you for pointing me to it.

Congratulations on the launch and thank you for all of your hard work, very happy with Ghostty so far and looking forward to continuing to use it :)