Re: OSX Meta bound to Esc!

[Tim McNamara]

zeppenwolf@angelfire.com (zeppenwolf) writes:

> In the emacs I get by typing "emacs" in the OSX unix shell prompt, I
> get an instance of emacs which has the "meta" stroke bound to the
> "esc" keyboard key.

Yup.

> Clearly, this is preposterous, right?  How can I bind the meta
> stroke to the option key?  I'd like to learn emacs and answer my own
> question, but one can't easily get through the tutorial without a
> workable meta key!

There's nothing preposterous about it.  "Meta" is bound to both the
ESC and Meta keys by default, when there is a Meta key and just to Esc
when there is not.  Often the Alt key is used as a substitute for the
Meta key.  In fact, the documentation makes this clear.

The problem lies not with Emacs but with OS X.  Try launching Terminal
and then going to Terminal menu -> Window Settings -> Keyboard popup
menu and make sure that the checkbox for using the Alt key as Meta is
checked.  If you're using an X11 version, you'll have to set one of
the X11 configuration files to map the Alt key as Meta.  

I haven't bothered to fix this yet, as the ESC key and the menus do
the job just fine.  Neither the Alt key nor the Cmd key work for Meta,
which is a change I noticed after updating from OS X 10.1.5 to OS X
10.3.2, with Emacs built from the same sources.  Under 10.1.5 it
worked fine, so Apple broke something when they updated the OS.

Alternatively your could try one of the several Carbon builds of
Emacs, which generally have this fixed (they may use the Cmd key as
Meta).

> PS: It (emacs) doesn't seem to work very well in other ways... keys
> dropped, stalling, just generally poo behaviour.  I can live with
> all that; I'm just hoping to refresh/learn emacs while waiting for
> customers on my job, but it's surprisingly fraught with issues.
> ISTR having a version of emacs which ran on my System 7 (!) machine
> much better than this one...

It's Apple, not Emacs.  There are moments of slowness, for a second
or two, when dealing with big files and such.

However, that deault version of Emacs provided in OS X is way behind
the times- version 20.7 IIRC.  Get a new one, it's light years better.
If you've got Panther and XCode, you can build yourself a spiffy new
Emacs from CVS in a snap, with fancy windows and graphics support and
a menu bar and everythang.  And it runs great under X11 or Carbon, or
you can build it without X support.  Even someone like me, with no
programming experience except an "Intro to Fortran" course 25 years
ago, can build a successful Emacs.

Follow the download instructions on the Savannah CVS site and the
build instructions on Andrew Choi's site:

http://savannah.gnu.org/cvs/?group=emacs

http://members.shaw.ca/akochoi-emacs/