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Mac OSX Quest: Unicode + Command as Meta Terminal

  1. Must display unicode properly

  2. Must let me use command ( AKA the apple key ) as META on the command line ( i.e. meta+b goes back one word )

  3. Option is not an acceptable substitute for META ( lookin’ at you, iTerm )

If anyone can fulfill this, I would be thankful. I’m looking at the code in iTerm to see if I can hack it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 8th, 2007 at 1:23 pm and is filed under cocoa, Technology and Computers. 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.

3 Responses to “Mac OSX Quest: Unicode + Command as Meta Terminal”

  1. Dale Says:
    January 12th, 2008 at 5:35 pm

    Have you found something to even meet #2? At this point #1 sounds easier… I’ve been looking for days, and the only thing I’ve been told is to run xterm in X11 where you can turn off shortcuts. This is undesirable for several reasons, not the least of which being that I can’t get gnome-terminal from MacPorts to… run.

  2. steven Says:
    January 13th, 2008 at 2:32 am

    Dale,

    I’ve actually been re-inspired by your comment to work things out and I can say: Yes! I have figured it out. That is, it works. The trouble is that I didn’t run this discovery in a controlled way, so perhaps YMMV.

    • urxvt ( got through MacPorts )

    • Remap can be done using Xmodmap. I, curiously, ran xmodmap once on a file containing the following directives. But then when I ran every urxvt thereafter, it was as if the xmodmap controls were run twice (??). So I removed this file, and the right behavior ( command-as-meta) stuck.

    • Set urxvt to use the following font string:

    #!/bin/sh
/opt/local/bin/urxvt -fn -lucidatypewriter-medium-r---14------* -bg black -fg cyan &

    Here’s the Xmodmap code:

    clear Mod1
    clear Mod2
    keycode 63 = Mode_switch
    keycode 66 = Meta_L
    add Mod1 = Meta_L
    add Mod2 = Mode_switch

    As a curious feature, my command+c ==Copy and command+click is mouse-paste.

    I think these are the elements you will need, but at the moment I’m getting the right display.

    id | value  |
2  | monēre |
  3. Steven Says:
    October 5th, 2010 at 11:25 pm

    I feel the same way and just use Mac’s stock X11 / xterm with an Xmodmap similar to what you have. Also I took it one step further since I like having a command key on both sides of the keyboard for more comfortable emacs ctrl-x ctrl-s… and on MacBooks there is a left arrow where the right control key should be so I’ve mapped left arrow to right control.

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