I noticed that iTerm2 offers the very convenient feature of using "Option key as +ESC" (or as meta, but apparently that's obsolete).

I tried them both and the option key works as expected in Bash (set -o emacs mode) and Emacs, but not in Vim. Thus, I can't make use of any "M-" bindings. What I've found is that:

  • if I set option to "+ESC", vim just understands ESC+key, and has no idea I actually meant Meta-key.
  • if I set option to "meta", keys modified with "option" behave just as without a modifier (don't know how to formally test what vim understands from a key combination that I'm typing).

"M-" mappings work perfectly in MacVim (7.3.53), but that's outside of a console and not in the scope of this question.

I'm interested in how to make those mappings work in Vim, under iTerm2 or Terminal.

My specs:

  • MAC OS X Lion 10.7.2
  • iTerm2 1.0.0.20111020
  • vim @7.3.107_0+python26 [though MacPorts]
vim osx-lion iterm
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