Comments on: Redefine the X11 Meta Key in Mac OS X

By: Leif

Leif — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 06:54:16 +0000

OMG, I am so happy I found your blog post. I’ve been trying (and failing) to fix this on my Macs for >2y now, and your .Xmodmap snippet totally works.

Goodbye mrxvt ! Good night, Terminal.app ! Farewell, iTerm ! Finally I can use the key to the left of the space bar as meta, locally, through ssh, using screen, in emacs, and in all combinations of those things. Thanks again for your post !

By: Mehryar

Mehryar — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 22:36:30 +0000

Life saver indeed! Spent an hour futzing with various options until I found this post. A copy and paste from your post into my .xmodmap fixed the issue.

By: kurt

kurt — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:00:25 +0000

thanks tons. emacs – metakey = awful.

By: Mohit

Mohit — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 01:10:28 +0000

life saver!!

By: Stegano

Stegano — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 03:52:36 +0000

No luck switching the Esc and Option Key for Meta function on Snowleopard and X11 XQuartz 2.3.4 (xorg-server 1.4.2-apple45). I tried both suggestions for .Xmodmap file and I can’t get it to work in emacs using X11 or xTerm or even remote emacs.

Any help will be much appreciated. God I am beginning to hate Apple for slowing me down.

By: Milo

Milo — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:45:22 +0000

Very useful. Your instructions helped me make the META key work when tunneling XEmacs on Linux via SSH to X11 running on my Mac (OS X 10.5.8). Thanks for writing this up!

By: Maks

Maks — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 05:21:25 +0000

Same here, I wanted TeXmacs badly. Thanks for the article!

By: Kris

Kris — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:05:05 +0000

Sure Bob, I use it too. My problem *was* TeXmacs (as cool as you can have for typing math). Thanks Tyler, greeting Down Under )

By: Bob

Bob — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 11:33:21 +0000

You could of course, just use AquaEmacs (http://aquamacs.org/)

By: Thulasinathan Kandasamy

Thulasinathan Kandasamy — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 01:55:03 +0000

Mapping alt/option key to meta key woks just cool for me as well. Thanks