Re: Sanest way to make emacs behave on a Solaris OS

[Bob Proulx]

I wasn't following this thread until now.  Although there are lots of
good suggestions this message had the most content that I wanted to
comment upon.

Harry Putnam wrote:
> Sorry, the emulator in use when I run emacs in X is xterm-261

I am also using emacs from within xterm-261.

> I always use xterm since it has more options that I know and
> understand. Far as I know, the rest of the wannabee wm terminals are
> all lessor copies of xterm.
> (Many thanks to Thomas Dickey's long standing and expert efforts)

Agreed.

> To be clear... the Meta key has worked as ALT does on linux right from
> the start.... I just caught it after my OP on this subject, and posted
> that I'd 'discovered' a sort of solution.
> 
> Its still kind of a pita just because of long habit on the ALT key in
> emacs. But much handier than ESC

In your Xterm, hold down control and left mouse button.  A menu should
appear.  Keep holding control and left mouse.  Drag down to "Meta
Sends Escape" and tick it so that it now has a checkmark.  As
previously suggested by others that is the same as the following X
resource.

  XTerm*metaSendsEscape:true

Since you say that Alt has the mod1 modifier making it a Meta key I
believe this should be enough.

> I still haven't tried your suggestion in .Xdefaults... but will soon.

Use of .Xdefaults is rather superseded by the .Xresources file.  The
difference between the two is subtle.  But .Xresources tends to be
preferred because of the way that it is applied.  The .Xresources is
applied to the $DISPLAY through xrdb.  The .Xdefaults is applied
through the presence in the $HOME directory, but only if the xrdb is
empty.  So once you have a .Xresources the .Xdefaults is no longer
used.

> If I'm not mistaken gnome references .xresources... so I keep
> .xresources symlinked to .Xdefaults and have for yrs.  

I assume you mean .Xresources with an X rather than .xresources.

> Just for the information, I'm working the solaris (openindiana) only
> intermittently as a vm guest on win7 64bit.  So trying things may
> happen rather slowly.

I am not using Solaris but in the past have been a long time user of
HP-UX.  The environment of yours as a VM under MS-Windows may cause
interactions with Windows.  Things that might "just work" natively
might have interactions with the host Windows system.  Beware.

Bob