How to change the meta key in Emacs?

Question

I've just started to put in the time to get to learn emacs. By default my meta key is bound to Esc, and I'm finding that really inconvenient. I read somewhere however that it's not a good idea to change the binding to Alt. Is that true? If not, how could I go about doing that?

Answer 1

For me, on my mac, it was bound to Alt by default, but I found it anoying because Alt is used for some special characters on Mac. I added these lines on my .emacs

(setq mac-function-modifier 'meta)
(setq mac-option-modifier nil)

Thus in your case, you would have to add this in your .emacs (I tried this solution, and it worked for me)

(setq mac-option-modifier 'meta) ; set alt-key to meta
(setq mac-escape-modifier nil) ; set esc-key to nil

Answer 2

I'm guessing that you're on Mac, because I had the same problem. This is how I fixed it:

1. Open Terminal
2. Open up the preferences
3. Open up the "Profiles" tab and choose the "Keyboard" tab with your current profile selected
4. Below the long scroll box are a couple check boxes. Check "Use Option as Meta key."

I'm using OS X 10.11.5, so I don't know about older versions of Terminal. I imagine that it would be similar.