What’s a good way to deal with a german keyboard when using Emacs on Mac OS X?

Question

Maybe it’s a bit weird to ask this question in English because my problem is a rather non-English one. I’m an Mac OS X user and I’m on my way to learning Emacs. I decided to use the Emacs 23.1 Cocoa build that by default uses the Mac keyboard’s alt/option key as the meta key. But because I am German and I’m using a German keyboard, of course, it get’s quite tricky to enter parantheses that are needed for programming extensively: { } [ ]

To get these characters on the German keyboard layout you have to press the following keys:

alt-5 for '['
alt-8 for '{'

which translate according to the situation described above to

M-5
M-8

both running the command digit-argument in Emacs.

I’m not really sure how to get around this issue. I know that you can change the actual key that should be used as the meta key (e.g. I could change the meta key to be the command key). But I think that every choice will come at a cost and have some obvious disadvantages as it “overrides” some predefined OS behaviour that may be needed while editing with a foreign language keyboard.

For now, the best option to me seems to be to use the CAPS LOCK key as the meta key as this choice doesn’t interfere with pre-existing key combinations.

What are your experiences concerning this issue? Do you (non-English) use an English keyboard (layout) while coding? Don’t you get mixed up with such context dependent keyboard layouts? Or do there exists some best practices which key to use as meta key on a German or similar keyboard? Or even some configuration options?

Answer 1

I ended up using the suggestion here. It recommends using this in your emacs config

(setq ns-right-alternate-modifier nil)

to reset emacs' default behavior for the right alt/option key. This keeps emacs from reacting to this key, allowing the OS to deal with it the way it normally would.

I found this to be a good solution because it's consistent with the solution that people at my job implemented in iTerm to allow them to have both access to []{}|\ and also take advantage of the bash command line navigation bindings like alt/meta-f, -b, -d, and so on.

In short, by using this configuration, the only pain I had to suffer was getting used to using right-alt for []{}|\ and so on, and left-alt for emacs commands.

Lastly, the above link was specific to Aquamacs, but I can confirm that the vanilla emacs install for for Homebrew also supports the option.