Flutterby™! : terminal pain

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terminal pain

2007-11-20 16:42:11.632112+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

John is looking for a terminal app for Leopard that doesn't suck. It's crap like this that keeps me way clear of the Mac for my personal use. To be fair, though, Windows doesn't suck any less on this and related issues.

More generally, I trained myself to use the escape key for Emacs[Wiki] "meta" long ago because of cross platform issues as to what that key to the immediate left of the spacebar meant.

[ related topics: John S Jacobs-Anderson Microsoft Macintosh ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: emacs on mac made: 2007-11-20 17:11:04.284044+00 by: Jim S [edit history]

I've used emacs on vt52s, vt100s, vt220s, vt420s, PC hardware, macs of every description. None of them had a meta key. That is just one of its endearing traits. In the face of nearly a billion counter examples, it continues to insist that all keyboards do have a meta key because some systems in an obscure lab had one once.

I'd recommend using the Carbon emacs that shipped with Leopard if you don't cycle in and out of emacs and the shell (the "fg edit C-z make&run cry" loop). You will need to get the Emacs.app bundle, but just softlink its executable to the /usr/bin/emacs. Then you can redefine keys to your heart's content.

There are instructions at a URL very much like this, but without the space in the middle: http://groups.google.com/group...ad/thread/8ca6604d69685837/5e334 ab3c5787589?lnk=raot

#Comment Re: made: 2007-11-21 01:31:45.215817+00 by: John Anderson

@dan, yeah, I should work on the ESC=M thing, it just feels a lot slower to have to reach aaaaall the way up into the corner.

@Jim, I do use the Carbon Emacs for the very few things I do locally on the Mac -- but my day job is the care and feeding of around a thousand Linux servers. I'm using the Mac to display a terminal so I can SSH back into the screen session that's always running on one of those servers, and in that always running screen session, there's an Emacs instance.

It's looking like there's light at the end of the desktop Linux tunnel at work, so I'll probably just live with the pain, at least for the moment...