Re: vterm and Meta?

[Spencer Baugh <sbaugh@janestreet.com>]

hw <hw@adminart.net> writes:
> On Tue, 2023-08-01 at 14:12 +0200, Thibaut Verron wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Are you using emacs in a terminal?
>
> sometimes
>
>> If not, Meta is usually bound to a modifier key (afaik by default the 
>> one immediately left of the space bar, e.g. alt on PC keyboards), and 
>> that works in vterm.
>
> Uhm, I've been using emacs for over 30 years and in all these years,
> the ESC key was always used for a meta key across all instances by
> default.  It's the same when running emacs in a terminal, as an X11
> client or with wayland.
>
> The key left of the space bar has always been the Alt key on all PC
> keyboards I've used so far.  Pressing, for example, Alt-x, inserts x
> into the buffer (like into this buffer I'm writing this reply in, and
> into the vterm buffer).
>
> How is it that it's different for you?
>
>> If you don't usually run programs using the Esc key in vterm, you can 
>> unbind it and send it with vterm-send-next-key when necessary.
>
> Hm, true, I can try that.  It's not like I need the ESC key too often
> in a terminal.  Somehow I didn't think of that, thank you :)
>
> But then, maybe it makes sense to reconfigure things to use the Alt
> key instead of ESC?  Apparently Alt doesn't do anything now and may be
> less awkward to type.  Hmm ...

It's possible to separate these in graphical frames.  I think you could

(define-key local-function-key-map (kbd "<escape>") nil)

to make <escape> no longer map to ESC.  Then you can remove the ESC
binding in vterm and add an <escape> binding.  Then Meta bindings and
<escape> will be separate.

(I know this because I figured it out for some evil-mode users and wrote
it up here: https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil/issues/1780 )