Black Pearl <
[email protected]> writes:
B. R. 'BeAr' Ederson wrote:
On Tue, 21 Jan 2025 17:31:49 -0600, Black Pearl wrote:
Black Pearl wrote:
I use these to such an extent that I'd really like a way to do this
character without involving the shift key.
Sometimes I see it written:
M-x <---- How do you do this with the keyboard?
M stands for "Meta"-key. It depends on your OS, which key this refers
to. On MS Windows, it is the <ALT> key, for example.
https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Alt BeAr
Okay. For some reason I thought it was the escape key and wasn't
getting anywhere. Thank you.
It is kind of Escape -- on Unix / Linux systems, when there is no native
Meta key on the keyboard, there is a convention that Meta becomes Escape
or when using Alt an Escape character is emitted in conjunction with a
typed character. So it's both.
Really, for NetHack or other games and applications that live in the
terminal, it depends on how you configure the OS and terminal to process keystrokes. You can also type Meta/Escape on Unix terminals with C-[, or Ctrl+[.
Historically, what Meta was meant to have done on very old terminal
hardware, was you'd have your normal 7-bit ASCII chars bound to the
usual character keys, plus Shift for uppercase &c., plus Ctrl to emit
control characters (used to send special signals to the terminal/running program), but as computers standardised on using 8-bit words (bytes),
you had an extra bit on the end of every character which your software
may not be using for something else (error checking or whatever), and
Meta became like a Shift key that toggled that final bit, allowing you
to type extra characters from an extended range, ASCII + 128 more chars,
in the same way that Shift allows you to use the (lowercase) letter keys
to type twice as many letters by shifting up the case.
These days, on non-Windows, non-Java platforms, ASCII characters are
mostly encoded via UTF-8, an ASCII-compatible version of Unicode, in
which the 8th bit of each ASCII character must be set to zero, so having
a Meta key toggle that final bit of the typed character is arguably
wrong or at least usually not wanted, as it produces malformed text (as
far as the terminal is concerned). Thus, it's become convention to have whatever your Meta key is instead act to modify the character typed by prefixing it with Escape.
The reason you see people using M-x this way, to type extended commands
in NetHack, is because that's a standard usage in the influential text
editor Emacs -- M-x for an eXtended command.
If you're on Windows, how these keys are interpreted will be wildly
different because Windows, even in its command lines like cmd.exe and powershell, generally doesn't seek to emulate the way Unix terminals
behave; and also Windows natively uses a different version of Unicode,
UTF-16, which is not ASCII compatible to begin with.
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