Re: OSX Meta bound to Esc!

[Thomas F. Burdick]

Tim McNamara <timmcn@bitstream.net> writes:

> Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@laposte.net> writes:
> 
> > I have probably missed the start of this thread, but I am a bit
> > surprised about it. Even the non-windowing emacs that Apple ships
> > with MacOS X uses the option key as the meta key (they couldn't use
> > the command key as that is used by the terminal). Nobody *has* to
> > use ESC on a Mac.
> 
> Apple neglected to provide a way to use the Alt/Option key as Meta in
> their implementation of X11.  You can use OroborOSX to correct this,
> but that takes a long time to launch and is still a beta, as well as
> adding yet another layer to the processes.  On my machine, creating
> an .Xmodmap to correct this caused the X server to crash repeatedly;
> not sure why, I don't have enough experience with this sort of
> thing. So I end up using ESC, and it works well enough.

Hmm, I'm pretty sure I had option setup as meta at one point.  But
maybe that was with XDarwin, before apple released X11.app.  Either
way, you are aware that under X11.app, the Command key is Meta, right?
Some of the menu shortcuts interfere with useful M- combinations (M-x
comes to mind), but you can turn them off.

> Kudos to Apple for building OS X over a BSD platform; however, they
> still don't quite "get it" as far as the Unix end goes.

Huh, I disagree -- I now use my Mac as something other than just a
really pretty Unix, but that's how I treated it at first.

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