Re: vterm and Meta?

[hw]

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 ...