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From: bob@allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield)
Newsgroups: comp.terminals,comp.emacs
Subject: Re: Recommendations for terminal with Meta key?
Message-ID: <18123@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: 19 Jul 88 14:18:46 GMT
References: <784@amethyst.ma.arizona.edu>
Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer & Information Science
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In article <784@amethyst.ma.arizona.edu> rsm@amethyst.ma.arizona.edu (Robert Maier) writes:
>I plan on buying a new terminal for personal use.  Since I use Emacs
>a good bit, a Meta key is high on my list of requirements.  An escape
>key, even a reasonably placed one, is a poor substitute.

Don't buy a terminal - buy something that will do terminal emulation
as a sideline, as well as a bunch of other stuff.  But be sure that
whatever you buy runs software can do very, very good terminal
emulation.  Then, you can be better off, even for terminal emulation,
than if you bought single-function, special-purpose hardware.

I use "uw" on my Mac at home when talking to the UNIX machines at
work, which gives me up to seven windows.  It almost makes a 1200bps
modem tolerable, and 19200 is plenty nice at the office when my Sun is
down.

Anyway, uw offers a Meta key, bound to the Option key on the Macintosh
keyboard.  It can be configured to either emit the true eight-bit
character, or prepend an escape character before sending the character
for whatever key you've chorded with it.

>To be effective a Meta key should be as close to the Shift key as the
>Control key is.  Switching from Control-v to Meta-v should be
>painless...

The Option key is located (on a Classic Mac or Mac Plus keyboard,
anyway) between the Clover key (control) and the Shift key, on the
lower-left side of the main keypad.
-=-
 Bob Sutterfield, Department of Computer and Information Science
 The Ohio State University; 2036 Neil Ave. Columbus OH USA 43210-1277
 bob@cis.ohio-state.edu or ...!{att,pyramid,killer}!cis.ohio-state.edu!bob