Subject: bug#18996: 24.4; Pressing Alt-g shows Esc g- when running emacs inside terminal and in GUI mode it shows M-g

From: Marcin Borkowski <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2016 19:14:17 +0100

On 2014-11-08, at 14:07, "L. Guruprasad" <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> When I press Alt-g as part of executing the shortcut M-g g, when running
> emacs within the terminal using the -nw flag, it shows up in the
> minibuffer as "Esc g-". But when I run the same in the GUI Emacs, it
> shows up as "M-g". This can be misleading and confusing to users who do
> not know Esc and Meta keys are equivalent.

Confirmed on GNU Emacs 25.1.50.6 (commit ac9a931).

> Further, when I press Alt-x, it shows up as M-x in both the
> scenarios. So it doesn't look like Emacs cannot differentiate between
> the two when running inside the terminal without a GUI.

This is not true: M-x is bound (by default) to
`execute-extended-command', which calls `read-extended-command', which
has at one point the literal string "M-x ", which is fed (via
a `concat', which shows prefix arguments, if any) directly to
`completing-read'.

> I vaguely remember seeing M-g in the terminal on pressing Alt-g some
> time back, maybe in an older emacs version. But not sure.

No idea, though I doubt.

All in all, I'll assign this a "wishlist" level - I agree with the OP
that it would be nice to have this solved, but I don't think this would
really confuse anyone.  (IMHO, if someone uses Emacs in a terminal, s?he
probably is advanced enough to know that M-g and Esc g are equivalent.)

-- 
Marcin Borkowski