XTerm Meta Key Weirdness

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 to “XTerm Meta Key Weirdness”

  1. Milan Says:

    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. William Says:

    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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