bug#51893: thoughts about keys

[Alan Third]

package emacs
merge 51893 5206
thankyou

On Tue, Nov 16, 2021 at 09:55:19AM +0100, Andreas Diener wrote:
> Dear Madam or Sir,
>  
> first: I am from Germany and not a foreign language correspondence clerk, so 
> please excuse my "not so nice" english. I
> hope you will understand my text (and my issue).
> I saw your email-adress on the gnu-emacs-site and I thought, you may be 
> interested in a comment from a kind of frustrated
> "almost-Emacs-user".
>  
> My setting: as mentioned I am from Germany so I work with german 
> keyboard-layout (on Mac), Emacs is 27.2. I am not a
> software engineer and I don't write programm code but "prosa" and at times I 
> use LaTeX. To make notes I like to work with
> a "slim" editor and simple txt-files with which I can work later on.
> Looking around I recently stumbled over Vim and Emacs and I am impressed how 
> powerful these programs are. And perhaps for
> me it is not really necessary to work with such advanced programms, I think 
> it is beneficial to know them (and
> additional: very interesting and although not so easy to handle I think 
> that's part of the fun).
>  
> Now: the Emacs seems not to be usable for me because of one thing (so far): 
> on a german keyboard there are several
> important charakters only available in combination with "normal" keys and the 
> ALT-key (= Meta-key in Emacs). In Emacs
> there are key bindings with the ALT-key and that's ok, but all the special 
> characters (e.g. \, |, [, ], {, }, @, ~, „ “
> etc.), which I need kind of frequently (among others for LaTeX) are not 
> available here.
> And I think that's kind of distressing, because the CMD-key (Mac) or 
> Window-key, which seems to be on every keyboard
> these days, is directly next to the ALT-key and not used at all.
>  
> So the thing seems this to me: even I'd like to explore the Emacs more I am 
> afraid I have to leave it as a serious
> option.

This is a duplicate of 5206 et al.

Unfortunately it's a question of defaults and there doesn't seem to be
a satisfactory solution.

If you're sure you never want to use the bindings on cmd, which
correspond with macOS shortcuts, you can put something like:

    (setq ns-alternate-modifier 'none
          ns-command-modifier   'meta)

in your init.el. There are other options which are described in the
"Mac / GNUstep Customization" section of the manual.
-- 
Alan Third