Just bits on a wire

So I’ve made my foray into the world of Mac and bought myself a sexy aluminum Macbook.  A couple of first impressions and comments:

  • The first thing I did was install Fink (so I can install unix packages)
  • Got emacs up and running.
  • Meta keys are all messed up, argh!
  • I can globally change my meta key through Mac OS, but that is awkward for the rest of OSX
  • Any ideas on how to change the meta key ONLY in emacs - I want it to be the command key.

Posted on Saturday, December 20th, 2008 at 10:06 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Macbook + thoughts”


(set mac-command-key-is-meta 1) should do it. This is default on Carbon Emacs, and I think on Emacs.app (Cocoa version currently only available from CVS snapshots).

Posted by: Andreas Jacobsen at December 27th, 2008 at 8:30 pm


Hi Kenshi,

any particular reasons why you installed Fink and not MacPorts?

Which flavor of Emacs are you using (Carbon, Cocoa, Source)?

In Carbon and GNU Emacs you should be able to configure the meta key with:

(setq mac-option-modifier ‘meta)

I don’t know if it also works in Cocoa Emacs as it’s often incompatible with the GNU way of doing things.

For reference: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Mac-Input.html

Greetings and have fun with your new Mac.

Posted by: Patrick at December 28th, 2008 at 7:21 am

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