If you use Zellij as your terminal multiplexer on macOS, you’ve probably hit the same wall I did: the default keybindings are built around Ctrl, but on macOS inside a modern terminal like Ghostty, Ctrl is a warzone. This post documents the full journey of finding a setup that actually works — including all the wrong turns.

The Problem with Ctrl on macOS

Zellij’s defaults use Ctrl as the modifier for every mode-entry key: Ctrl+T for tabs, Ctrl+P for panes, Ctrl+O for sessions, and so on. On macOS, this causes immediate conflicts:

Problem

While I use ¹ Obsidian to capture everything while I’m at the desktop, it gets tricky when I’m away from the Desktop. Especially during my morning walk, I listen to Audiobook, and want to capture either a quote or some of my own related thoughts. ²

Solution

Today, I came across a YouTube Video ³ which addresses this issue.

Zsolt goes on to explain how see sought suggestions on Twitter ⁴

Important components of his solution are to use Google Keep on mobile (Voice assistant if need be)

I needed this, because Dendron uses 13-digit epoch time, for created and updated timestamps. While it is not a problem when notes are created from within VSCode (as is expected - since Dendron is a VSCode plugin) - I don’t use VSCode much.

While Dendron has command line tools to create new notes, and notes are markdown only the timestamps are problem.

Hence, the need to create 13-digit epoch time.

date "+%s" can be used to get the epoch time, it only returns 10 digits. Since I don’t care about millisecond precision in my time stamps, I can always add 3 extra 0s at the end, yet it is a hassel.

I wrote about Espanso long time ago. I have been using Espanso since then.

Recently, I had a need to add timestamp in a note. Espanso already comes with a trigger to insert date via :date. As the name suggest, it just inserts the date.

So I added the following to the match/base.yml file.

  - trigger: ":timestamp"
    replace: "{{timestamp}}"
    vars:
      - name: timestamp
        type: date
        params:
          format: "%b %d, %Y %I:%M%p"

As might be obvious, now I get timestamp just by typing :timestamp anywhere.

I wrote about espanso in past here and here, and I’ve been using it ever since.

Since helix is (for now) terminal-only editor, my espanso shortcuts work very well with it.

e.g. I can type :smile: and get 😄, and type thru and get through (Automatic correct the usually misspelled words 🎉)

Espanso works well with neovim-in-terminal (and Emacs), but I use Neovide GUI, where they don’t work.

While reading the documentation on Espanso’s main site, I noticed a Search bar feature.

To be sure, after some time, one is unlikely to remember all the shortcuts one has added, along with ones that came with packages.

So search bar is a welcome feature. But shortcut mentioned on the site Alt+Space did not work. I was not surprised, because this key combination triggers Raycast on my machine.

So I went looking for way to change the hotkey, and reached an issue which mentioned that search bar is a feature of 2.x Alpha 💡

Just as I was getting to know espanso, I came across a brand-new version of espanso that is way better that this (0.7.6) version, now called Legacy version. Read about the new version here

I have left the following as is, for posterity