XTerm Meta Key Weirdness

Jun 12 2005

I’m blogging this for posterity.

If you have problems with XTerm not working with the alt key as expected (like in ETerm or others), ctrl-left click and hold, and select Meta sends Escape from the menu.

Problem solved.

2 responses so far

  1. Thanks. This is just great. I’ve been struggling with this since I went from KDE to IceWM (few weeks ago) and replaced Konsole with Xterm.

  2. Awesome. I found this page via Google and it solved my meta key woes since I switched to dwm.

    Anyway, you can add the following entry to your .Xresources file to make the change permanent:

    XTerm*metaSendsEscape: true

    To load the changes without restarting X, run

    xrdb -override .Xresources

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