Getting Alt to act as Meta

Getting Alt to act as Meta

[Joao de Sa Coutinho]

Hi,

I've just installed Debian 3.0, and I'm running emacs 20.7.2 in X Windows,
under KDE ; the problem I have is that the Alt key is *not* working as Meta, I
have to use Esc instead.

Under RedHat 7.2, in the same emacs 20.7, the Alt key works as Meta
off-the-box.

Can anyone tell me how I can reconfigure this, so that Alt becomes Meta ? Xev
shows the keysym to be Alt_L, BTW.

Thanks,
Joao

Re: Getting Alt to act as Meta

[Alex Schroeder]

Joao de Sa Coutinho <joao@teaser.fr> writes:

> Can anyone tell me how I can reconfigure this, so that Alt becomes Meta ? Xev
> shows the keysym to be Alt_L, BTW.

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?MetaKeyProblems has some
info on this...

Alex.

Re: Getting Alt to act as Meta

[Joao de Sa Coutinho]

Alex Schroeder <alex@gnu.org> writes:

> Joao de Sa Coutinho <joao@teaser.fr> writes:
> 
> > Can anyone tell me how I can reconfigure this, so that Alt becomes Meta ? Xev
> > shows the keysym to be Alt_L, BTW.
> 
> http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?MetaKeyProblems has some
> info on this...

Indeed it has the answer. I need to execute the command

  xmodmap -e "clear mod4"

and there's no more Meta, so then Alt gets recognized. Although I couldn't get
this to be recognized inside a .Xmodmap nor a .xmodmaprc file, so I had to look
for what .xinitrc file was being executed (/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc on my Debian
3.0) and add that command in there.
> 
> Alex.

Thanks Alex, problem solved.

Joao