Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1997 14:23:00 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: David Bassin <dbassin AT extro DOT ucc DOT su DOT oz DOT au>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: emacs and right alt key
In-Reply-To: <DBASSIN.97Mar17140558@extro.ucc.su.oz.au>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.970318142228.17465Q-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII


On 17 Mar 1997, David Bassin wrote:

> seems well, except that the right alt key seems to have no effect; for
> example, holding the right alt key down and typing `a', followed by M-x
> view-lossage, shows just `a' rather than `M-a'.

This is a feature.  The ``Keyboard and Mouse on MS-DOS'' section of
the Emacs manual says that only the LEFT Alt key is mapped to the Meta
key.  The reason is that people who use MS-DOS or MS-Windows on non-US
keyboards need the right Alt key to generate some special characters,
so Emacs tries not to break that international keyboard support.

This cannot be corrected on the Elisp level, but I have a source patch
that will make both Alt keys work as Meta keys when the international
support is not installed (the patch checks for KEYB.COM to see if
international support is required and modifies the right Alt key
handling accordingly).  This change will be in the next Emacs release,
but if you can't wait, I can send you the patch.  You will have to
install the Emacs sources (em1934s1.zip from the same place you got
Emacs should be enough) and rebuild Emacs on your machine, though.