OSX Meta bound to Esc!

OSX Meta bound to Esc!

[zeppenwolf]

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.

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!

Eden

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...

Re: OSX Meta bound to Esc!

[Phil Stripling]

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.
> 
> Clearly, this is preposterous, right? 

I am happy to inform you that the esc key will work fine. Type the esc key
(hit it and let go), then type the key you would use with the meta key.

> How can I bind the meta stroke
> to the option key? 

I am sorry to say that it may depend on which version of OS X you are
using. I'm in Jaguar. I go to Terminal -> Window Settings ... and then
choose Emulation from the menu on the Terminal Inspector dialogue box. You
will see a box to check for Use option key as meta key -- check it, and the
option key is your meta key.

-- 
Philip Stripling                | email to the replyto address is presumed
Legal Assistance on the Web     | spam and read later. email to philip@
http://www.PhilipStripling.com/ | my domain is read daily.

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/

Re: OSX Meta bound to Esc!

[Tim McNamara]

Phil Stripling <phil_stripling@cieux.zzn.com> writes:

> 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.
>> 
>> Clearly, this is preposterous, right? 
>
> I am happy to inform you that the esc key will work fine. Type the
> esc key (hit it and let go), then type the key you would use with
> the meta key.
>
>> How can I bind the meta stroke to the option key?
>
> I am sorry to say that it may depend on which version of OS X you
> are using. I'm in Jaguar. I go to Terminal -> Window Settings ...
> and then choose Emulation from the menu on the Terminal Inspector
> dialogue box. You will see a box to check for Use option key as meta
> key -- check it, and the option key is your meta key.

Too bad Apple didn't provide a similar setting with X11, rather than
having to set the keymap.  IIRC that OroborOSX had a setting to allow
Alt key emulation of Meta.

Re: OSX Meta bound to Esc!

[Eden Smallwood]

In article <m265fkxrgx.fsf@Stella-Blue.local>, Tim McNamara
<timmcn@bitstream.net> wrote:

€ There's nothing preposterous about it.

    Nothing?  Not even a little?  The Esc key is *not* even a real
modifier key, it's in the upper left hand corner, (only), so even if
it were a mod key, I'd have to type the "letter" with my thumb, it's
completely tiny, (on this and some kbds), and there is an unused mod
key, labelled "option" & "alt" sitting there unused, in the right
place, and it's nice and chunky.

    A "wee bit silly" then? :)

€ Terminal menu -> Window Settings -> Keyboard popup
€ menu and make sure that the checkbox for using the Alt key as Meta is
€ checked.

    Yup!  I'm hooked up fine, thank you and t'other fellow too. A bit
freaky finding a checkbox for JUST EXACTLY THIS... like finding a check
box labelled, "If you're Eden Smallwood, click here"!

€ > PS: It (emacs) doesn't seem to work very well in other ways... 
€ 
€ It's Apple, not Emacs.

    Ok no problem; I don't want to slam emacs, just reporting.

€ Follow the download instructions on the Savannah CVS site and the

    Wish I could do them nifty things, but it's my work machine, id
est, it's the boss' machine, dernit.  Thanks,

Eden

-- 
Mail from here: www.lafn.org/~zeppenwolf

Re: OSX Meta bound to Esc!

[Christopher J. White]

timmcn>  There's nothing preposterous about it.

eden>     Nothing?  Not even a little?  The Esc key is *not* even a real
eden> modifier key, it's in the upper left hand corner, (only), so even if
eden> it were a mod key, I'd have to type the "letter" with my thumb, it's
eden> completely tiny (...)

I've been using emacs for for than a decade and I've used nothing
*but* the Esc key for all M-<key> combinations.  I was actually
surprised to find out after years of use that it was possible to to
M-<key> another way.  I may be remembering incorrectly, but wasn't
Esc the original meta key in VT-100 days?

...cj

-- 
------------------------
-- Christopher J. White                                    
--
-- chris @ (---)
--   grierwhite . com
------------------------

Re: OSX Meta bound to Esc!

[Arjan Bos]

Eden Smallwood wrote:

> In article <m265fkxrgx.fsf@Stella-Blue.local>, Tim McNamara
> <timmcn@bitstream.net> wrote:
> 
> € There's nothing preposterous about it.
> 
>     Nothing?  Not even a little?  The Esc key is *not* even a real
> modifier key, it's in the upper left hand corner, (only), so even if
> it were a mod key, I'd have to type the "letter" with my thumb, it's
> completely tiny, (on this and some kbds), and there is an unused mod
> key, labelled "option" & "alt" sitting there unused, in the right
> place, and it's nice and chunky.
> 
>     A "wee bit silly" then? :)
> 
Wellll, since you can press the <ESC> key and release it before you type 
the second key, it means that you can use any finger you like. ;-)

I find myself pressing the apple-key for M-<single keystroke> and <ESC> 
for those things that require me to press the <shift> key as well, like 
<ESC><shift>5 for replace (M-%) and <ESC><shift>, for (goto-char 
(point-min)) (M-<).

The only thing I find annoying is that in the Terminal.app, the meta key 
is bound to <alt>, so I have to switch typing modes slightly.

Arjan

--
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Re: OSX Meta bound to Esc!

[Konrad Hinsen]

In article <m21xq1yhcj.fsf@bluesteel.grierwhite.com>,
 posts@grierwhite.com (Christopher J. White) wrote:

> I've been using emacs for for than a decade and I've used nothing
> *but* the Esc key for all M-<key> combinations.  I was actually
> surprised to find out after years of use that it was possible to to
> M-<key> another way.  I may be remembering incorrectly, but wasn't
> Esc the original meta key in VT-100 days?

I think DEC (the inventor of the VT-100) meant the escape key to be used 
as it is in Emacs, and used it in the same way in its VMS editor.

Every now and then, I find myself facing a strange keyboard on a strange 
machine, and then I am happy to be able to use ESC to work with Emacs. I 
hope it won't go away. For daily use, a proper Meta key is of course 
nice to have.

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.

Konrad (now with three Emacs installations on his iBook)

OSX Meta bound to Esc!

[Craig A. Finseth]

In article <konrad.hinsen-038859.10201915012004@news2-2.free.fr>,
Konrad Hinsen  <konrad.hinsen@laposte.net> wrote:
	...
>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.

Except, of course, those of us who learned Emacs over 25 years ago on
terminals without META keys and never switched...using ESC for meta is
now hardwired into my nervous sytsem.  (For that matter, the basic
Emacs editing keys are hardwired into my nervous system...)

Craig

Re: OSX Meta bound to Esc!

[Tim McNamara]

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.

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.

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.

-- 
           /|_     .-----------------------.                        
         ,'  .\  / | No to Imperialist war |                        
     ,--'    _,'   | Wage class war!       |                        
    /       /      `-----------------------'                        
   (   -.  |                               
   |     ) |                               
  (`-.  '--.)                              
   `. )----'                               

Re: OSX Meta bound to Esc!

[Tim McNamara]

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.

Re: OSX Meta bound to Esc!

[Thomas F. Burdick]

Tim McNamara <timmcn@bitstream.net> writes:

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

You might have some bad config settings.  In a fresh X11, Command is
Meta, except for the menu items.  You can change that in the
Preferences by unselecting "Enable Key Equivalents Under X11", in
which case it'll be simply Meta.

-- 
           /|_     .-----------------------.                        
         ,'  .\  / | No to Imperialist war |                        
     ,--'    _,'   | Wage class war!       |                        
    /       /      `-----------------------'                        
   (   -.  |                               
   |     ) |                               
  (`-.  '--.)                              
   `. )----'