For historical reasons, most terminals (except for some modern ones like Kitty, iTerm, and foot) send the exact same keycodes for different keys. For example, the key sends the same code as . When Kakoune receives an ambiguous code, it has to decide what key to decode it to:

Therefore, if you map a key from the first column, the mapping will not trigger in the regular terminal UI. Instead, you should map the key from the right-hand column to achieve the same effect.

If you really want to map instead of (because has some mnemonic value, for example) you can make Kakoune manually trigger the first-column mappings in addition to the second-column mappings:

hook global normal RawKey        %{ execute-keys -with-maps ; execute-keys -with-maps  }
hook global normal RawKey        %{ execute-keys -with-maps  }
hook global normal RawKey  %{ execute-keys -with-maps  }

• https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/issues/1012
• https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/issues/2209
• https://github.com/mawww/kakoune/issues/2554