As mentioned in other answers, macOS treats <A-n>
as a "dead key" in order to enter accented characters, such as ñ
(<A-n>n
). It doesn't seem possible to disable this programmatically, and you have to use an alternative keyboard input source to work around this.
However, the <A-n>
keys are not the keys used by the extension that IdeaVim's multiple-cursors
is based on (terryma/vim-multiple-cursors). I'm not sure where they came from, but vim-multiple-cursors uses <C-n>
, <C-p>
and <C-x>
and only uses <A-n>
to select all occurrences, which is different to the IdeaVim behaviour. There is an issue tracking the wrong key mappings - VIM-2178.
In the meantime, you can remap the keys to match the Vim plugin by adding the following to your ~/.ideavimrc
:
" Remap multiple-cursors shortcuts to match terryma/vim-multiple-cursors
nmap <C-n> <Plug>NextWholeOccurrence
xmap <C-n> <Plug>NextWholeOccurrence
nmap g<C-n> <Plug>NextOccurrence
xmap g<C-n> <Plug>NextOccurrence
nmap <C-x> <Plug>SkipOccurrence
xmap <C-x> <Plug>SkipOccurrence
nmap <C-p> <Plug>RemoveOccurrence
xmap <C-p> <Plug>RemoveOccurrence
And you can work around the <A-n>
issue for "select all occurrences" by mapping to something else, such as Shift+Ctrl+n:
" Note that the default <A-n> and g<A-n> shortcuts don't work on Mac due to dead keys.
" <A-n> is used to enter accented text e.g. ñ
nmap <S-C-n> <Plug>AllWholeOccurrences
xmap <S-C-n> <Plug>AllWholeOccurrences
nmap g<S-C-n> <Plug>AllOccurrences
xmap g<S-C-n> <Plug>AllOccurrences