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

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From: Marcin Borkowski <mbork <at> mbork.pl>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
Cc: 18996 <at> debbugs.gnu.org, lgp171188 <at> gmail.com
Subject: bug#18996: 24.4; Pressing Alt-g shows Esc g- when running emacs inside terminal and in GUI mode it shows M-g
Date: Tue, 08 Mar 2016 17:47:48 +0100

On 2016-03-05, at 19:52, Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> wrote:

>> From: Marcin Borkowski <mbork <at> mbork.pl>
>> Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2016 19:14:17 +0100
>> Cc: 18996 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
>> 
>> > 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
>
> To have what solved?
>
> If you type "C-h l" after M-x, what do you see?

AFAIU, OP wants to see "M-g-" and not "ESC g-" after pressing M-g in an
Emacs session in a terminal.  This looks reasonable to me, though
definitely not a high priority.  If it's not possible/desirable, it
would be better to close this as "wontfix", but I do not know that.

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University

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