Using the emacs bindings in pycharm in OS X Lion

Question

I am trying to use the emacs keybindings in Pycharm 1.5 in OS X 10.7. They all work except that ALT+B inserts a beta symbol rather than moving back a word. It's puzzling since ALT+F does correctly move forward a word. Also, I was wondering if Pycharm has support for moving between matching parentheses or brackets, like Control-Meta-F in emacs. I didn't see an option for this in the Pycharm keybindings preference pane. Thanks!

Answer 1

I found a solution on the JetBrains forum. The forum post includes a keymap as an attachment that globally disables the alt keys from generating symbols.

Quoting the forum, "So, after some digging around, I figured that this option key maps to these relatively unused symbols that are take precedence in the operating system. Using http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=ukelele (Ukelele), I was able to generate an optimized Emacs keyboard layout. You should take this and put it in your /Library/Keyboard Layouts/ folder.

Reboot, and switch to use this keyboard layout on the Mac OSX toolbar and the option key will be free for hotkeying in PyCharm. I'll write up a blog post about this later.

Hope this helps."

Answer 2

esc-ctrl-b works for me, but alt-b doesn't. It's right there in the emacs keymap, so it's strange at first, but I think the problem is that alt-b is mapped to a character (∫ rather than ß in my case) so PyCharm doesn't see it as a key-modifier pair, just a single character.

Switching to a different international keyboard map will change which combinations work and which don't. I'd suggest sending a bug report to PyCharm as it's something they can fix, or alternatively you'll have to hack your keyboard mapping somehow.

To answer your other question, I don't think that there's a way to go to matching parenthesis, or at least I've never found one.