Fixing emacs bindings in iTerm2

I spend a decent amount of time in org-mode, using Emacs + iTerm2 on a Macbook Air. I fixed a recent annoyance I encountered when using Emacs org-mode to track time for a project.

Org-mode has a handy time tracking feature and as the manual points out both C-S-<up/down> S-M-<up/down> can be used to call various functions for adjusting recorded time. In particular I wanted to use org-timestamp-down to add some time for a CLOCK item I had forgotten to start before a Skype call.

Obviously though, I hadn’t used S-M-down previously because when I did instead of adjusting the time, I only got the raw escape code .

I tried adjusting the settings in iTerm2 to no avail, so after a bit of a meandering search down the emacs rabbit hole I found a solution that worked well for me.

(define-key input-decode-map "\e[1;10A" [M-S-up])
(define-key input-decode-map "\e[1;10B" [M-S-down])
(define-key input-decode-map "\e[1;10C" [M-S-right])
(define-key input-decode-map "\e[1;10D" [M-S-left])

(define-key input-decode-map "\e[1;3A" [M-up])
(define-key input-decode-map "\e[1;3B" [M-down])
(define-key input-decode-map "\e[1;3C" [M-right])
(define-key input-decode-map "\e[1;3D" [M-left])

One handy tip in discovering these keybindings was to use cat to display the raw keycodes:

$ cat





This can also be done use C-q in emacs if you prefer, both will give you the results you need.