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I’m on a Mac and would like to use the function key F19 as meta.

(There’s a good reason, although it's a bit of a hack: My built (the otherwise excellent port by Yamamoto Mitsuharu) doesn’t support using only the left alt key as meta while preserving the native behavior (inserting special characters) of the right alt key.. So I remapped the left alt key to an unused key - F19 - on the system level with PCKeyboardHack (xmodmap is sorely missed) and would like to tell Emacs to use that as meta.)

So, how do I: use a function key (F19 in my case) as meta key in Emacs?

(I’m fairly new to Emacs and, after some googling, tried out something like

(define-key global-map [f19] \M)

but that, of course, doesn’t do the trick (Symbol’s value as variable is void: M)

coanil
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    This thread looks very similar to another one at the following link -- perhaps that can help steer you in the right direction: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10730775/emacs-create-key-modifier – lawlist Mar 30 '14 at 15:53
  • Thanks for that link. Made me try something else and I'm happy with the way it works now. In case it will be useful to someone: I remapped the left (and only the left) alt key to the fn (function) key and put (setq mac-function-modifier 'meta) in my .emacs. It's the same idea, but utilizes the fn key instead of f19. – coanil Mar 30 '14 at 17:31

1 Answers1

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Well, with

(setq x-alt-keysym symbol)

you can tell emacs what key is to be understood as meta, but afaik it only accepts 'meta, 'alt, 'super and 'hyper as symbol. Maybe try it with f19.

An alternative option that will work but which will require adaption to a new way of working would be to use F19 as a prefix key (like you use C-h or F1 to invoke help commands):

(define-prefix-command 'f19-map)
(global-set-key (kbd "<f19>") 'f19-map)
(global-set-key (kbd "<f19> x") 'execute-extended-command)
(global-set-key (kbd "<f19> u") 'upcase-word)
...

Writing the configuration shouldn't be too hard. Just press C-h b to get all existing keybindings and edit the help buffer. Get rid of all lines that don't start with M-, then use rectangles to replace all occurrences of ^M- by (global-set-key (kbd ", and so on.

Yet another option would be to bind the key to Esc instead of F19, as long as that's supported by your system, and use the esc prefix instead of the f19 prefix. That way you don't have to change the emacs configuration at all.

ACz
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