Every once in a while I'll do something that causes strang behavior when pressing certain keys.
1)The single quote key (') will not type a character unless I press it twice, in which case it will print two backwards single quote characters (``).
2)The ` (backwards single quote?) key types a # character.
3)The angle bracket keys (< and >) type a single quote (') and a period (.).
4)Shift + any A-Z character types the character and brings the code completion window up.
I'm sure there's other symptomps, and they only want I've found to stop it is to restart Visual studio. This behavior does not appear in any other apps. Anybody experience this?
I started getting this on my computer (not in Visual Studio, but everywhere else). I had default input language set to "English(New Zealand) - United States-International", whatever that is supposed to mean. Changed it to English-US. Disabled the "Language Bar"
"Control Panel >> Regional Settings >> Languages, click on Advanced, look at Installed Services. See if you have multiple choices - if you have an "International" option, remove it and I believe the problem will go away. It did for me.
AFAIK, this happened when I installed XP-SP3.
You probably have an alternate input language set up (try typing ` a when this happens and you'll get à). I think the default hotkey to switch between input languages is Ctrl+Shift, so you're probably hitting it by accident occasionally. Use the language settings control panel to turn off the hotkey or remove the unwanted keyboard configuration.
I have a laptop/keyboard which can be used for French-Canadian. Alternative key-meanings are printed on some keys (in green) ... and they match the keys you mentioned, i.e.:
alt of ' is ``
alt of ` is #
alt of < and > are ' and .
I have an edition of Vista installed that knows about French-Canadian. On the right-hand end of the O/S Taskbar, near the clock, there's a keyboard icon. It's usually set to "US but if I set it to "Canadian French" then I get the key mappings you describe.
Something similar (i.e. changing the language-specific interpretation of the keyboard) must be happening on your machine too. You say it's in Visual Studio, but for me I find it in my O/S.
If you have multiple languages on your machine, then you probably triggered this behavior by pressing ctrl+shift, which causes windows to switch the system language for the active window.
You can either press it again, or better yet, disable the language bar and all other secondary languages.
Like others have said, you can press ctrl-shift to "loop" through the settings.
Related
In most OS X apps, even the Terminal which otherwise seems to lack features, cmd+ctrl+space brings up a character menu, where you can type in the name and look for special characters (e.g. greek alphabet). In Sublime Text 2 this does not come up; I just get the bell sound. I tried the trick described Unmap ctrl+space in Sublime Text 3 of mapping the key to the empty command, but that did nothing. Anyone have an idea of how to enable the menu?
The default shortcut for this in ST2, of course, is alt+super+t, but I assume you are wanting to remap this, right?
If so, I looked pretty hard on this one, unfortunately, I couldn't find much to help. It is not a default command, and even if you look inside Packages/Default/Main.sublime-menu, right where the "Special Characters..." line should appear, it is conspicuously absent. Logging all commands in the console using sublime.log_commands(True) shows nothing when I open the special characters window this way.
I understand that Mac has some Emacs keybindings enabled by default (e.g. Ctrl+A move to beginning of line etc.). If I open TextEdit for example I can navigate like in Emacs.
But when I try Alt+F or Alt+b for move to next word or last word it does not work. It prints out ƒ and ∫ instead.
Is there a way to jump words instead?
I think that I did not tinker with the keybindings and I use the US layout on a german keyboard.
If you want to re-enable them for the terminal
Terminal -> Preferences -> Keyboard
Check 'Use Option as Meta key'
my iTerm2 version is 3.1.6, profile -> keys -> set Esc+
Maybe one of these helps? (I don't use OSX myself, so I can't test anything).
http://blog.sensible.io/2012/10/19/mac-os-x-emacs-style-keybindings-everywhere.html
http://aufflick.com/blog/2006/01/10/emacs-keybindings-everywhere
Summary from first URL:
Create file ~/Library/Keybindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict with the following content and restart all apps.
{
"~d" = "deleteWordForward:";
"^w" = "deleteWordBackward:";
"~f" = "moveWordForward:";
"~b" = "moveWordBackward:";
}
I'm a little confused if you're talking about the keys (within different apps on OS X) or specifically Emacs. On OS X the standard keys you would use to jump between words is:
option/alt + Left Arrow or Right Arrow
If it's specific to Emacs for OS X:
For Terminal.app, starting from Snow Leopard: Go to Preferences > Settings > Keyboard > Use option as meta key.
For iTerm: Go to Manage Profiles > Keyboard profiles > (your profile) > Option Key as…
If you want to use Option key for both international characters and
Meta key in Emacs, see info below for iTerm 0.10.x patch and/or binary.
Alt-b and Alt-f for navigating by word also works for your shell now.
UPDATE: The link the original website providing the patch is no longer online, however I was able to retrieve the cached information from the archive.org:
OSX + terminal + Meta key + national characters
Quite a mix, right? If you’re user of one of those keyboard layouts that have hidden some non-ISO1 characters under Option-key shortcuts and you use command line – read on, I might have a treat for you.
As it stands today, if you’re OSX user, and would like to use your Option (Alt) keys for both national characters and Meta-* shortcuts, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise – you can’t. It’s one or the other: both iTerm and Terminal.app allow you to flip between Option keys role, but neither of them allows you to use Option for both. Under Linux, it’s customary to use left Alt for Meta-* and right Alt for any national characters you might require. Same goes for Windows. Of course you can just train yourself in using ESC key in a prefix manner, but that’s avoiding the real problem.
Getting annoyed by this state of things, and faced with some Emacs usage, I decided to take advantage of the fact that iTerm is opensource software, and see if I can make a tiny change, to cater for my needs. Surely enough, after ~25 minutes I got a trivial patch: just changed the mask that iTerm uses for detecting that Option key is pressed down. It took few hours and 5 chapters of Cocoa book, to turn that into fully-fledged option in Keyboard Profiles section of iTerm. This was my first foray into lands of Objective C; while I came back victorious, I don’t see myself writing anything bigger in Objective C in nearest future.
Here’s the meat: ( https://sourceforge.net/p/iterm/patches/44/ )
“right Option is Normal” patch;
full patch allows you to pick which keys should be treated as Meta (both, only left, only right);
The patches were made against 0.10.x branch, at revision
1871.
Once you have the binary, launch it and go to Bookmarks > Manage profiles > Keyboard profiles. If you select a keyboard profile, you should see a new dropdown at the bottom of the keybindings list.
The options should be pretty much self-explanatory. The configuration shown above is the one I’m using — this way I get all Meta-* shortcuts with my left Option key, and all Polish characters with right Option key. Which is the way it Should Be™ :)
I haven’t heard from iTerm authors yet, so I have no idea whether this patch is going to merged upstream or not. I’ve been using my patched version for almost week and a half now, and nothing major exploded. Yes, iTerm is slower to redraw the screen on larger terminals (say, 130×80), but there are certain features (like 256 colors support) that make up for that.
more info: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForMacOS
On iTerm2 3.0.15, go to:
Preferences -> Default -> Keys tab ->"Left option() key acts as:"
and change the value to:
+Esc
Solved this at the OS level as follows,
⟶ System preferences
⟶ Keyboard
⟶ Input Sources Tab
⟶ + at bottom left
⟶ Others in the left panel
⟶ add and select Unicode Hex Input from right panel
✓ Mac no longer prints anything on alt+letter|number
✓ enter unicode characters via alt+[code]
✅ the OS does not grab alt key shortcuts!
You should use KeyRemap4MacBook. In the Emacs Mode section, you will find numerous options to use the Option key as Meta including Option+BF to Option+Left/Right.
However, if you're a hardcore Dvorak user like myself who wants to use key bindings such as M-b and M-f using the original Dvorak layout, there's a problem. You can only "move backward/forward one word" in QWERTY layout. I use version 8.4.0 so I don't know about the latest version for Mavericks.
I use BetterTouchTool. Works like this:
Basically remaps Option-F and Option-B to Option-Right and Option Left, and I turned this on for any apps that I want the shortcut in, e.g., Firefox, Obsidian, Slack. Works great!
For Hyper you can fix the option key by setting the following configuration to your ~/.hyper.js file:
module.exports = {
config: {
modifierKeys: { altIsMeta: true }
}
}
source
I found out that the Bash shell supports a type of autocompletion that is different from the "traditional" autocompletion, where all possibilities get listed on the following line.
With the "traditional" autocompletion, if I type ch and then press the Tab key, I get something like:
$ ch
chacl chgrp chmod chown chvt
But if I add the following line to my /etc/inputrc (which remaps the Tab key to the built-in menu-complete function):
Tab: menu-complete
then the behavior of the shell changes: the word to be completed is replaced "inline" with a single match from the list of possible completions, and if I press the Tab key again, the word gets replaced with the next match.
I found this useful, but I still wanted to keep the traditional autocompletion and have it bound to the key combination Ctrl + Tab. So I added the following line to my /etc/inputrc file, according to what the readline library documentation suggests:
Ctrl-Tab: complete
However, adding this line only seems to make both Tab and Ctrl-Tab call the traditional complete function.
Does anyone know what I am doing wrong?
Thanks in advance!
To start with, I'm not a massive expert in this area, but I think I can answer your question. First of all, while you are using Bash, Bash is a shell which interprets keyboard commands that it receives from a terminal / console. While you are informing Bash how to react to specific key combinations in the inputrc file, your Terminal determines precisely which character is 'sent' to the Shell before the inputrc file even enters the equation.
Unfortunately, on my system (granted, it's OSX - but I don't think this is strange behaviour when compared to Linux), both Tab and Ctrl-Tab send the same keyboard input to the shell. Infact, both Tab and Ctrl-Tab send a Ctrl-I command to the shell, and indeed, if I enter Ctrl-I when using the terminal, it performs the completion as if I hit Tab.
The software (installed on most Linux systems by default), showkey will tell you what keys the shell is receiving when you press specific keyboard inputs as you push them.
Anyway, my suggestion to you is to use Shift-Tab, which does appear to send it's own key-code to the shell. Shift-Tab on my computer shows up (using showkey) as '<ESC>[Z', which I think is pretty standard across the board. As such, your inputrc file with the following bindings should allow you to use shift-tab instead of ctrl-tab to achieve what you desire:
Tab: menu-complete
"\e[Z": complete
The \e in the second binding represents the escape character, and the [Z are simply the characters as shown using showkey. You can get a similar effect on OSX by simply using cat, running cat from within a terminal and pressing Shift-Tab will show you "^[[Z", where ^[ represents the escape character and the other characters are as before.
I know this doesn't resolve your question precisely, but as I don't think you are able to use Ctrl-Tab as a key combination, without re-mapping Ctrl-Tab to another keybinding within your terminal (more likely to be easier if you are using a GUI terminal), this is likely as close as you can get without significant effort!
I have ShiftTab bound to menu-complete-backward, so it goes back one step if I skipped the right completion, and I've mapped Ctrlq to complete, so if there are several possible completions I hit Ctrlq to list them without having to cycle through them.
# Make Tab cycle between possible completions
# Cycle forward: Tab
# Cycle backward: Shift-Tab
TAB: menu-complete
"\e[Z": menu-complete-backward
# Make C-q display the list of possible completions
Control-q: complete
# Display the list of matches when no further completion is possible
set show-all-if-unmodified on
Edit: Ctrlq is bound to quoted-insert by default, that is, it tells the shell to take the next key literally. quoted-insert is also bound to Ctrlv, so you don't lose that functionality if you rebind Ctrlq. Anyway, I've found that AltESC also works, by default, for showing the possible completions (as far as I can tell it is equivalent to TAB); note that it may be seized by Gnome, then either double press ESC or rebind "Switch windows directly" in Settings → Devices → Keyboard → Navigation.
The following should achieve what you're looking for (if I understand correctly!)
In your .inputrc
# display all possible matches for an ambiguous pattern at first tab
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
# next tab(s) will cycle through matches
TAB: menu-complete
# shift tab cycles backward
"\e[Z": menu-complete-backward
Where to start, if you can or cant do this is dependent your keyboard and your drivers and there isn't one catch all answer. Each key press and release generates a sequenced key pair (key down and release) (scancode) these codes are then translated by the kernel into keycodes for example on my laptop keyboard 0x3a 0xba are translated to keycode 15 (down and up) these are then translated into actions such as return letter c a / you can assign actions to keysyms using the keycode/hex/binary/octal notation which codes match which letters is determined by the kernel translation table which is fairly standardized, however the first part signal that's translated to keycodes is different for most keyboards.
Continuing with the earlier example for me shift tab (and alt and control and any combination) produce keycode 15 however in hex it produces 0x2a 0x2a 0x2a 0x2a 0x2a 0x2a 0x2a 0x2a 0x2a 0x2a 0x2a and this is because shift alt and control are special keys (modifiers) these multiply out against the keycodes and fill out the dumpkeys table the kernel is limited to the number of assignments as well this is determined by your choice of keymap and shares resources with your terminal colors (if your char set its defined above the threshold it limits your terminal color scope). And this all goes out the window if your in an xserver and has a whole new system. Most of these things can be changed,modified and manipulated by the user and programs installed. My point to all this is to emphasize that there is no catch all for the mapping of the tab key and its going to vary keyboard drivers to kbd drivers (now if you find a solution that happens to work for you excellent :)) but chances are it won't be portable and might not work if you change keyboards and might not translate between xserver and tui. What i recommend is learning the steps to modify your kbd on the go.
will give you the decimal octal hex notation for a key press on the same line
--full-table -1 >> keytable
will give you a documented with your full list of keycode->keysym pairing in a format that will give you a better picture of your layout and from there you can either use loadkey to change a keys value or ad an entry in .inputrc or your main rc file. You can also create a custom key.map file.
Further escape sequence translation is determined by the "$TERM" variable and each virtual terminal emulator can be different
infocmp "$TERM"
will give you a list of your terminal escape sequences
Resources:
https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man4/console_codes.4.html
https://www.gnu.org/software/screen/manual/html_node/Input-Translation.html
http://kbd-project.org/docs/scancodes/scancodes.html
https://www.vt100.net/
So to sum up.
Your keyboard drivers
Your kemap choice
Your virtual terminal emulator
and your kernel
form the backbone of remapping dificult keys (tab/s-tab/a-tab)
I'm not sure Ctrl-Tab is a real character; my terminal, for instance, ignores the combination. I think the only way to use Ctrl-Tab is to use your terminal emulator to map it to some otherwise unused escape sequence, then bind that sequence to complete.
What is the keyboard shortcut navigate back to the last cursor position in Visual Studio?
It Will not work for red color (-) key. For me it only works for blue color combination.
According to Visual C# 2008 Keybinding Reference Poster it is Ctrl + -. The name of the specific keybinding is View.NavigateBackward.
PS: While researching I also found that Ctrl + . is the same as Shift + Alt + F10. Nice!
ctrl + - (dash) navigates backward.
ctrl + shift + - (dash) navigates forward.
These settings can be found under Environment -> Keyboard:
For Changing the setting in Visual Studio 2019:
Search for view.navigate
CHOOSE "Text Editor" from the "Use new shortcut in:" drop down menu
Select your shortcut
Global doesn't catch for this.
For new VS Code(1.28.2)
Back: Ctrl+Alt+- (dash)
Forward: Ctrl+Shift+- (dash)
The most generic answers is: there is no working default and you need to define your own keyboard shortcuts for View.NavigateBackward and View.NavigateForward.
Why? For most keyboards, the default shortcut is a broken, unusuable combination because VS badly handles the shift and altGr modifiers. MS did not pay attention to portability and internationalisation so much when they redeveloped VS after version 6, and this is still true today. This bug has been there for way more than a decade, nearly two decades. At this rate, it will never be fixed. And yes, I have filled a bug report, and I'm certainly not the only one.
However, their "VSCode" product line does have better keyboard handling as it doesn't depend on the shift or altGr modifiers to identify the key. For example, when you are in text writing mode and press the key that has the dash symbol, without using shift nor altGr, let's say it writes something else, like number 6. To VSCode when it comes to shortcut handling, that's still the dash key for its purpose. As long as a key has the symbol written on it, whether this is painted as the 1st, 2nd or 3rd level doesn't matter, it just that key.
Of course, it's never a good thing to make the default shortcuts use non-alphanumeric symbols, that's always confusing, whether it works or not. The good mature text editors have known that for a long time and should be taken as examples of things done right. In some ways, VS learned a few good things from emacs with shortcuts that are a sequence of two letters, but ultimately screwed up on other parts with the choice of non-alphanumeric bindings, combined with a broken low-level keyboard handling.
This works for me in Visual Code
Navigate backward Alt+←
Navigate forward Alt+→
Is there a way to use an alt / option key as a meta key but still be able to use it to make some characters which need it?
For example, in my local keyboard layout:
# is alt + 2
\ is alt + shift + 7
| is alt + 7
etc.
So, if I set alt as a meta key, I can't make those characters anymore. On the other hand, using "press esc, release esc, press a key" to make meta key sequences makes my hands hurt.
Any Emacs users with international keyboards who have solved this, please give any tips you might have! :)
Edit:
It appears that I can set alt as a meta key and then add these kind of settings in inputrc: "\e2": "#" This works in the bash shell but it still won't work with Emacs though, so no good.
I use a Swedish keyboard in Mac OS X and use the following setup for Emacs.app:
First I have KeyRemap4MacBook installed and I have it setup to change the left Option key to Command.
I then have the following in my .emacs:
(setq mac-option-modifier 'none)
(setq mac-command-modifier 'meta)
This makes Emacs treat command as Meta and ignore Option. Since the left Alt/Option key is remapped to command, this makes it work lite meta while the right Alt/Option key still works for entering special characters like # [] and {}.
App specific Mac shortcuts like Cmd+C and Cmd+V no longer work, but global shortcuts like Cmd+space for Spotlight and Cmd+Tab for app switching do.
Update:
If you use iTerm2 as a Terminal, that has support for mapping only the left Alt/Option key to meta, which means you can still use the right AltGr/Option key for entering special characters. This also means you can use meta as normal inside Emacs running in the iTerm2 terminal.
I have a Swedish keyboard on my Mac and I'm using Aquamacs. Adding the two lines (attribution goes to Joakim Hårsman)
(setq mac-option-modifier 'none)
(setq mac-command-modifier 'meta)
in .emacs (and restarting Aquamacs) did the trick for me.
with iTerm2 you can map the left option key to ESC/meta and leave the mapping of the right option key to "normal". This way you can use the right option key to type accents etc.
Think about using a full featured Emacs for Mac OS X. I use Carbon Emacs but I believe others (say Aqua Emacs or X11 Emacs) would do the trick.
If you insist on using Emacs in a terminal you can use the C-x 8 prefix as a compose key. Try C-x 8 C-h to get a list of possibilities.
See http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsForMacOS
Two work-arounds I use:
I use xterm running under X11.app. X11.app uses the command key as meta.
When running emacs in Terminal.app, I just use the rfc1345 input-method, which allows me to enter all kinds of crazy non-ascii characters without needing an option key.
Check out cmd-key-happy. This little app has worked wonders for me. It allows you to use command as meta, with exceptions that you can configure.
Author's info follows:
This program allows you to swap the command and alt (or option) keys
in any application, but in particular Terminal.app.
http://github.com/aim-stuff/cmd-key-happy
This is an old post but adding an alternatives for Robots to find.
I borrowed a couple of files from Aquamacs(emulate-mac-keyboard-mode.el, aquamacs-tools.el) that fixes the problem (I have a Italian-Pro keyboard) :
(defun aq-binding (any)
nil)
(load "~/.emacs.d/emulate-mac-keyboard-mode.el") ;; 'noerror
this provides:
few minor modes (emulate-mac-italian-keyboard-mode,
emulate-mac-french-keyboard-mode,
mulate-mac-swiss-german-keyboard-mode, etc)
a menu to play with all the options provided by Aquamacs
Tested with Emacs-23.3-universal-10.6.6 and seems to work ok for me.
Thanks Aquamacs for this, what about pushing this upstream if not already done.
It's worth thinking about the assumption behind the question. I mean to say that the real problem is making the characters that currently seem to need the option key. This problem can be solved without achieving simultaneous 'meta key + alt functionality'.
Let me explain: I have a similar problem. On my UK keyboard, shift-3 is mapped to the pound sign, £, which means that I generally need to hit option-3 to get the very useful # - a real problem in Terminal, where I use option as meta. However, I find most of the above solutions to be a little over-the-top. I don't want to change to another version of Emacs (eg. Aquamacs), to switch to a different Terminal application (eg. iTerm or xterm), or to install a key-remapping application (eg. KeyRemap4MacBook) all for the sake of one symbol! Perhaps that would suit some people, but I thought it was worth pointing out that if the problem is just one character, it can be solved with a nine-character text file.
With regard to my personal version of this problem, I find the simplest solution is to create a file called .inputrc in my home directory, consisting of the following single line:
"§": "#"
This re-maps the (to me, quite useless) § that can be found to the left of the 1 on the current Mac keyboard to the (almost indispensable) #. That suits me even better than the default setup, because I can now get # with a single keypress. If there were any other characters I needed to remap, it would just be a matter of adding an extra line for each one.
Anyway, that deals with how to get the missing character in the shell, but if you also want it in Emacs (which you didn't say but is probably the case) then you can add something like this to your .emacs file (where 35 is the ASCII for the character I happen to want, ie. #):
(global-set-key (kbd "§") 'insert-hash)
(defun insert-hash ()
(interactive)
(insert 35))
It might not be such a neat solution if there were dozens of characters that I routinely wanted to access via the option key, but there aren't.
I hope this helps somebody. As a mere weekend hacker, I ordinarily wouldn't dare post an answer to a question on Stack Overflow...
Special keyboard layout with option deadkey
My solution to this problem is a special keyboard layout I have written, U.S. custom. It provides an option deadkey that produces option combos without having to use the physical ⌥ Option modifier key. For instance, the character ⟨ç⟩ is produced as follows on a normal U.S. keyboard layout:
Hit ⌥ Option+c.
The U.S. custom keyboard layout adds a second way of producing ⟨ç⟩:
Hit ⇧ Shift+§ (the option deadkey), then release it, then hit c.
This works even in Terminal.app when Use option as meta key has been checked.
Note that the U.S. custom keyboard layout does two additional things:
It converts plain § into a ⎄ Compose key (so you could also produce ⟨ç⟩ by hitting §, then ,, then c).
It replaces the CapsLock mapping by a (significantly extended) U.S. Extended keyboard layout.
Remap option deadkey to right option modifier key
If you have a physical ANSI keyboard, then you lack the § key. In that case, I recommend assigning the § key to some other key, for instance to the right ⌥ Option modifier key. Install KeyRemap4MacBook, open ~/Library/Application\ Support/KeyRemap4MacBook/private.xml and paste the following code:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
<item>
<name>Send ISO Section for right Option</name>
<identifier>private.send_iso_section_for_right_option</identifier>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::OPTION_R, KeyCode::UK_SECTION</autogen>
</item>
<item>
<name>Send Shift+ISO Section for Shift+right Option (keep normal right Option without Shift)</name>
<identifier>private.send_shift_iso_section_for_shift_right_option</identifier>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::OPTION_R, ModifierFlag::SHIFT_R, KeyCode::UK_SECTION, ModifierFlag::SHIFT_L</autogen>
<autogen>--KeyToKey-- KeyCode::OPTION_R, ModifierFlag::SHIFT_L, KeyCode::UK_SECTION, ModifierFlag::SHIFT_L</autogen>
</item>
</root>
Then, open the KeyRemap4MacBook preference pane, hit ReloadXML and then select “Send ISO Section for right option”. Now, your ⌥ Right Option key is remapped to §, so while the U.S. custom keyboard layout is active, hitting ⇧ Shift+⌥ Right Option will give you the option deadkey state (hitting ⌥ Right Option without additional modifiers will give you a deadkey state equivalent to the option modifier.
If want to keep ⌥ Right Option when ⇧ Shift is not pressed (instead of the ⎄ Compose key), then select “Send Shift+ISO Section for Shift+right Option (keep normal right Option without Shift)” in the KeyRemap4MacBook preference pane (instead of “Send ISO Section for right Option”). Like that, only ⇧ Shift+⌥ Right Option will produce the option deadkey, while plain ⌥ Right Option will continue to work as an option modifier. You can even continue using ⌥ Right Option+⇧ Shift modifier combos (for instance ⌥ Right Option+⇧ Shift+c→⟨Ç⟩) as long as you don’t hit ⇧ Shift first.
The above answers mention ways to enter non-ascii input, but that's not really the problem here. The C-x 8 method lets you enter a bunch of non-ascii, but the problem is that you need the option key on mac just to enter the (ascii) character `|' (vertical bar)!
So how do you then enter stuff like M-| (region to shell command) when running emacs in ssh under Terminal.app? No way for it but to use the escape key, since | is option-7 and Terminal.app for some stupid reason won't let you use Cmc as meta :-(
(If anyone knows of a hack (SIMBL perhaps?) that actually does let Terminal.app use Cmd as meta, I'd be very grateful...)
The following solution works, is UNOBTRUSIVE and you don't need iTerm2 or Aquamacs or whatever.
Step 1
Keep "Use option as meta key" turned ON in the Terminal.app Settings.
Step 2
Edit ~/.inputrc (make it if it doesn't exist already), add the following line:
"\e3": '#'
This will remap ⌥ alt + 3 so that you produce a # character as expected in the terminal, instead of it annoyingly coming back with the prompt (arg: 3).
Step 3
Edit ~/.emacs, add the following line:
(global-set-key (kbd "M-3") "#")
This will remap ⌥ alt + 3 so that you produce a # character as expected inside emacs, instead of it annoyingly doing nothing.
Caveat 1, This is just 1 re-map. So ⌥ alt + ? (other keys) won't be remapped, e.g. you may wish to remap ⌥ alt + n to produce the tilde key ~. Simply follow the same steps outlined above obviously switching 3 with whichever key you need going forward.
Caveat 2, When you ssh into another box, you will face the same difficulties, but all you have to do there is edit the ~/.inputrc and ~/.emacs files on that box.
Caveat 3, I'm British, on a British MacBook. So I can't vouch for foreign MacBooks.
Aquamacs supports that, at least for my (french) keyboard. Once Aquamacs is installed (via drag'n'drop), you can go to Options -> Option, Command, Meta keys and choose an appropriate setting for your keyboard (in my case, ...Meta & French). I am not proficient with Emacs, but all the useful combinations I have tried seem to work ([, {, |, and so forth).
Supported keyboards, according to the menu items as of version 2.1, are :
British
US
Swiss-french
Swiss-german
Finnish
Italian-Pro
Italian
Spanish
French
German
I would guess the Aquamacs team would be grateful for any contribution, though, should your keyboard not appear in the list.
I bit the grass and started hitting the escape key instead. You get use to it...
I would like to mod this question up or something because i also use a Swedish keyboard where i must press alt+7 or alt+shift+7 to make | and \ respectively.
I also use Irssi in Terminal.app and these don't mix well.
I'm a long time vim user though so emacs is not an issue to me.
Isn't there some way to remap CMD to be Meta in Terminal.app?
So far i've been surviving by simply typing /wg N in Irssi because having those characters in my Terminal is much more important than IRC.
A solution would be worth gold to me though! :)
This is years late, but for people coming across this page whilst searching for a solution, as I did, I have decided to build one myself, one that doesn't require abandoning Terminal.app in favour of iTerm 2.
It is a simple status bar app that runs in the background and rewrites all left-Alt + $KEY key events to two key events in rapid succession, Esc, then $KEY; however, it only does this if Terminal.app is the focused application.
You can find it here at https://github.com/habibalamin/Metalt.
I assigned escape to the caps lock key and it works quite good. You can configure it easily in the mac system preferences > keyboard > modifier keys.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/282092/236382