Regarding Emacs and the Meta key in FreeBSD.

Question

When I am running Emacs (in GUI mode) in GNOME, the meta key works fine ie alt-v jumps back one page. But when I remove the line: "gnome-enable" from rc.conf and reboot FreeBSD then alt-v does not work in Emacs (although ctrl-v works). Doing alt-v in Emacs without GNOME simply prints v at the cursor. Yea... i can of course use esc as the meta key... but I would really love to use the alt / option key of my MacBook as the meta key. I am running FreeBSD 8.1 on a MacBook. Please help.

Thanks.

Answer 1

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MetaKeyProblems goes into all (or most) of the ways that this can go wrong, and how to fix them. I don't have a gnome-enable locally, but I imagine that one of the things it does is (setq x-alt-keysym 'meta) .