Ghostty + Zellij 👻 setup on Mac

Cristobal Dabed — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 18:40:23 +0000

So i have been using Ghostty with Zellij on macOS for a while, as my favourite goto terminal and workspace.

Problem

However, some things have been bothering me for a while that I couldn't sort out until now:

The Option key on macOS wasn't being interpreted as Alt correctly in the terminal
Jumping forward a word with Option+Right would trigger Zellij's floating pane toggle instead
Reordering tabs with Alt+i and Alt+o did not work as expected

This happens because macOS terminals convert Option+Right to Alt+f (for "forward word" navigation), which conflicts with Zellij's Alt+f floating pane keybinding.

Solution

1. Configuring Ghostty to treat Option as Alt

Set the macos-option-as-alt option in your Ghostty config e.g.:

# Enable Option key as Alt for keybindings
# Use 'left' so right Option key can still type special characters
macos-option-as-alt = left

This lets us use the left Option key as Alt for Zellij keybindings, while the right Option key can still type special characters (',~, |, etc.).

2. Rebinding the floating pane shortcut

Since Option+Right still is interpreted as Alt+f by the terminal, we need to change Zellij's floating pane keybinding. This can be changed in your Zellij config e.g.:

bind "Alt Shift f" { ToggleFloatingPanes; }

Hope this helps you out, if you have been struggling with the same issues like i did 👋

DEV Community: Cristobal Dabed

Ghostty + Zellij 👻 setup on Mac

Problem

Solution

1. Configuring Ghostty to treat Option as Alt

2. Rebinding the floating pane shortcut