On Sat, Apr 21, 2001 at 10:30:18AM -0700, Harry Putnam wrote:
> Peter Pentchev <roam@orbitel.bg> writes:
>
> [...]
>
> > > I'm an emacs user and would like to use the left alt on my keyboard
> > > for emacs `meta' key rather than having to use ESC.
>
> [...]
>
> > > Is this a hardware thing that cannot be changed or something OS
> > > related I can do to make the left alt key work for emacs?
> >
> > Indeed, this is something OS-related. The kernel does not treat the Alt
> > keys as Meta at all. For a patch against 4.x-stable (made against 4.2-STABLE,
> > but works perfectly well against 4.3-RELEASE or 4.3-STABLE), see
> > http://people.FreeBSD.org/~roam/bsd/
>
> Cool, but to bother you a bit further. How does one apply a patch
> like this. Or rather, where to look to read up on how to apply a
> patch like this?
Well, since you're tracking -stable, you should already now how to
cvsup and make buildworld/installworld :) So I'll skip that part.
The important part here is the patch itself - simple :) Change to
/usr/src, or wherever you keep your sources, and do:
patch -p1 < /path/to/alt_is_meta-RELENG-4.patch
(after you've downloaded and uncompressed it).
The -p1 and the change to the source directory is just to make sure
that there are no mistakes - it is perfectly safe to do this from /usr
and use patch -p0, if your FreeBSD sources are in /usr/src.
Then you'll have to run mergemaster and build/installworld as usual.
Running mergemaster could be skipped, if you put the new sysctl
(kern.alt_is_meta) in your /etc/sysctl.conf, but if you don't, you
may put alt_is_meta="YES" in your /etc/rc.conf, and rc.i386 shall
do the work for you. Yes, yes, I know, I should move the sysctl
to something other than kern.*, and I should move the patch to
rc.syscons instead of rc.i386.. but given that I seem to be the only
user of that patch so far, this has been somewhat postponed ;)
The bad news? You'll have to reverse and reapply the patch
each time you cvsup :) Reversing is easy, change to /usr/src and run:
patch -R -p1 < /path/to/alt_is_meta-RELENG-4.patch
> Also, there must be others using emacs and alt/meta some way before
> now isn't there?
Well, when I originally posted the patch to -hackers, I received
several responses telling me that Alt works just fine as the Meta
key in X.. You and I seem to be among those last console die-hards ;)
G'luck,
Peter
--
This sentence contains exactly threee erors.
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