OldMiner's Journal: Meta Key

This goes to linux because prior to actually heavily using linux (college) I had only seen a few random mentions of the 'meta' key in my life. And I have yet to see any Windows/DOS/OS/2 program that had something that responded to a 'Meta' key. Perhaps that's because these are operating systems which have had a strong habit of tying themselves to the present day hardware. Or are a little more user-interface centered. But I ramble.

My point:

Today I finally received a full understanding what a Meta key is. I've been forced to use XEmacs on occasion because some professor found it to be the editor from the gods (or at least said editor prefixed with an 'X') and wanted me to realize why it kicked gvim's ass. It didn't take long for me to ask what a "M-g" meant [the shortcut key for 'go to line' -- I hate using the mouse if I can avoid it, especially when coding]. A friend told me "just tap ESC, then hit g". I said "How stupid," did it, and it worked. Further, since then I've frequently seen mention of an AltGr 'chord'. PuTTY in particular takes note of the thing in one of its options, and I use PuTTY enough now (perhaps unwise given its security history) that not knowing what an option does slightly bugs me. However, I started not to care so much about all of these 'chords'. It was a lost cause. Searches for keyboards only found me standard 101/102 key keyboards, occasionally finding me an AZERTY or Dvorak keyboard, but little else.

But then I got in the habit of using the Linux machines around here, and ESC just didn't work for the Meta key. Or it was difficult enough to time it right so that it did work that I couldn't do it that way. It was a small pain recoding all of the desktop shortcut keys to being Ctrl-Foo instead of Meta-Foo. So, I did a little more searching, and learned that my right Alt (and only my right Alt) key did that job.

And thanks to that E2 node on the 'space cadet keyboard' (above) I finally understand where all of this nonsense came from. And, oddly enough, it links back to those LISP machines I've heard so much folklore about. Stories abound about these things, like easy symbollic debugging and code correction during runtime -- things which were difficult/impossible in debug and remain difficult in gdb (at least hand patching an executable in situ). Simultaneously this is somewhat magical and somewhat annoyingly archaic. The only keyboards I've ever seen with an AltGr key that's labelled as such are attached to AIX machines in the server room.

Incidentally, if someone could provide a link to a picture of said keyboard layout, I'd love to have a look. You'd be amazed how hard it is just to find a decent picture of a properly labelled AZERTY keyboard.