OS X Terminal: Meta key + alt functionality at the same time

Question

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 l

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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...