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Re: OSX Meta bound to Esc!


From: Tim McNamara
Subject: Re: OSX Meta bound to Esc!
Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2004 22:22:34 -0600
User-agent: Gnus/5.1006 (Gnus v5.10.6) Emacs/21.3.50 (darwin)

tfb@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:

> 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?

Not on my install (10.3.2).  Command key does nothing in X11 except
run a few menu items (minimize window, close window, launch
applications, etc).

>> 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.

I guess we'll disagree on that, then.  There are significant issues
with things like the linker, missing libraries and include files, dumb
installation, etc.  A functioning gcc should be included with the base
distribution, not a 1+ GB add-on that also includes a bunch of crap
that is only useful for programming for Aqua, and which can't be
deleted if one wants to be able to install Apple's XCode updates-
which one pretty much has to do because of how Apple has mucked about
with BSD to make it Darwin.

It's a vast improvement over all prior Mac OSes that I've used since
1986, to be sure, and it's the only reason that I still use a Mac
(that and I'm too cheap to buy a new computer, and too busy to convert
the one I have to something more standard).  It's just irritating to
have to spend hours to bring the Unix aspect of OS X up to snuff.


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