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.