Alieniloquent

I’m an Emacs user, and I run on a Mac. I just use GNU Carbon Emacs out of CVS.

As long as I can remember, my command key mapped to the meta key in Emacs. This was particularly bothersome as it got my fingers in the habit of typing command-w to yank some text. But when I’m editing on a remote server in a Terminal window, that closes the window. Sometimes I manage to do it twice before I hit the option key instead.

I used to have this in my .emacs, although I never really noticed it:

(when stesla-mac-p
  (setq mac-command-key-is-meta nil))

A week ago when I wanted to finally fix this and make my command key do something other than be meta and make my option key be my meta key, I began to baffle as to why it wasn’t that way already. See, Google told me that the code I had in my .emacs should have done what I want.

Well, it turns out that it used to be how to do it. Emacs is cooler now, and lets you specify the behavior of all three special keys. So now what have is this:

(when stesla-mac-p
  (setq mac-command-modifier nil)
  (setq mac-option-modifier 'meta))

This makes Emacs not recognize the command key as a modifier at all and use the option key as meta, which is how I like it.