Re: Alt as meta, except for certain keys, how?

[Kevin Rodgers <ihs_4664@yahoo.com>]

Jussi Piitulainen wrote:

> I want to use Alt as a Meta key, with the exception that certain keys
> should be interpreted as ordinary unmodified characters: Alt-7 should
> produce vertical bar |, Shift-Alt-7 alias Alt-/ should produce
> backslash \, and there are a few others, all in ASCII.
> 
> I have managed to (global-set-key "\M-7" "|"). That works for writing
> but is not a real solution. At least in an incremental search Alt-7
> has already been interpreted as two keys: the escape terminates the
> search and 7 is inserted in the buffer.


Try setting search-exit-option to nil.


> I could not work out how to use keyboard-translate to turn Alt-7 into
> vertical bar. If this is possible, could someone please show me the
> concrete command? Or any other way to achieve my goal?


(keyboard-translate ?\M-7 ?|) doesn't work, because keyboard-translate-table
is a char-table, which only handles unmodified characters.

So perhaps you can use (abuse?) function-key-map:

(define-key function-key-map "\M-7" [?|])

That only takes effect if you also remove its default binding:

(global-unset-key "\M-7")


> Emacs is 21.3.50.6 from 2002-11-27, a binary distribution for Mac OS
> X, the keyboards are Apple's - Finnish layout - Alt is sometimes
> called Option. I know I lose a couple of command bindings; I can
> produce all accented letters with dead keys.


-- 
Kevin Rodgers