Using emacs bindings in pycharm in OS X Lion

Question

I am trying to use emacs keybindings in Pycharm 1.5 in OS X 10.7. They all work, except that ALT + B inserts a beta symbol, and does not return a word. This is bewildering, since ALT + F moves the word correctly. Also, I was wondering if Pycharm supports moving between matching brackets or brackets like Control-Meta-F in emacs. I did not see this option in the preferences panel of the Pycharm buttons. Thanks!

Answer 1

I found a solution on the JetBrains forum. A forum post includes an attachment layout that globally disables Alt keys from character generation.

Forum quote, "So, after some digging, I decided that this key key is mapped to these relatively unused characters that take precedence in the operating system. Using http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id = nrsi & id = ukelele (Ukelele), I managed to create an optimized Emacs keyboard layout.You should take this and put it in your / Library / Keyboard Layouts / folder.

Reboot and switch to using this keyboard layout on the Mac OSX toolbar, and the option key will be free for PyCharm hotkeys. I will write a blog post about this later.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

esc - ctrl - b works for me, but alt - b does not work. It’s right there in the emacs key card, so at first it’s strange, but I think the problem is that alt - b maps to the character (∫, not ß in my case), so PyCharm does not see it as a key-modifier pair, just one character.

Switching to another card on the international keyboard will change which combinations work and which don't. I suggest sending a bug report to PyCharm as it can fix it, or, as an alternative, you have to redraw the keyboard somehow.

To answer another question, I don’t think there is a way to go to the corresponding bracket, or at least I never found it.