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From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041020 Galeon/1.3.17 Description of problem: Emacs has two main modifier keys for generating keyboard shortcuts: control and meta. On a PC, the most convenient way to use emacs is to make the "logo" keys (the "Windows" key and possibly the "menu" key) be meta; the alt key is then available for other purposes, such as generating accented characters. (Alternatively, alt can be used as meta. But this is broken as well, and is reported as bug #135505.) x11's xkb facility provides a mechanism by determining how modifier keys are mapped. Previously, one could supply the altwin:meta_win option to xkb, and that would make Emacs recognize the Windows key as meta. But this no longer works. So, as the Emacs and xorg-x11 that come with Fedora Core 3 interact, it is not possible to get any key to work as meta under emacs. One is forced to use the escape key for that purpose, which is very inconvenient. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): xorg-x11-6.8.1-12 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Issue the command `setxkbmap -option "altwin:meta_win"' 2. Type the 'f' key while holding down the Windows key in Emacs under x11 Actual Results: No effect Expected Results: Cursor should have gone forward one word in the current window. Additional info: Using the "describe key" command (C-h k) command in Emacs yields the following result for this key combination: "H-M-s-f is undefined". What Emacs should have received is "M-f" (which is bound to the forward-word command). Thus, because x11 sets the "hyper" and "super" flags, and not just the "meta" flag as is expected, Emacs doesn't recognize the key combination in the desired way. This bug has been reported on the emacs development list: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2004-10/msg00016.html Posts on this thread give reasons why the behavior of x11 was changed so that this problem is produced; it has something to do with facilitating the simultaneous use of two keyboard layouts. One post also mentions that Debian has been struggling with this for some time. In Fedora Core 2, I was able to get around this problem by modifying the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/altwin by commenting out the line modifier_map Mod4 { <META>, Meta_L, Meta_R }; in the definition of meta_win. Apparently, what this did is made Emacs receive "Alt-f" when one pressed 'f' while holding down the Windows key, and Emacs interpreted the "Alt" as meta. This is consistent with what is reported in bug #135505. Thus, it may be that the change from Fedora Core 2 to Core 3 here is not in xorg-x11 but in Emacs. It appears that the immediate problem is that a patch to Emacs to treat Alt as meta was removed. But this patch itself was apparently a workaround to a bug in xorg-x11. A similar problem is discussed under the heading "After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs, the Meta key stops working" in /usr/share/emacs/21.3/etc/PROBLEMS. Unfortunately, the suggestions given there are not helpful in the present case.
My speculation in the next-to-the last paragraph above did not pan out. I reinstalled emacs-21.3-12, the version that is part of Fedora Core 2, and it behaved in exactly the same way.
My previous comment is on the wrong track. To restore normal behavior of Emacs, I had to BOTH go back to emacs-21.3-12 AND xorg-x11-6.7.0-2. (xorg-x11-6.7.0-9 is also broken in this respect.) Just either going back to either the earlier version of Emacs or the earlier version of x11 doesn't work: one has to restore both. Another course of action would be to see if the patch given in the post to the Emacs development list I linked to in my bug report above works. I didn't want to take that route, since clearly, it is xorg-x11 and not Emacs that needs to be fixed: bash command-line editing is meant to allow keyboard shortcuts on the Emacs model (e.g., M-f for move one word forward), but that doesn't work with the new xorg-x11 either.
A post on the Fedora list (https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2005-January/msg03869.html) gave a solution to the problem. With the current CVS snapshot of Emacs, the meta key works fine, under the newest Fedora Core 3 release of xorg- X11 (xorg-x11-6.8.1-12.FC3.21).
This should already be fixed in update 21.3-21.FC3 released recently. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 137868 ***
Could you please confirm the above package fixes the problem for you and, if not then please re-open this report. Thanks.
Changed to 'CLOSED' state since 'RESOLVED' has been deprecated.