Subject: bug#1993: 23.0.60; Emacs.app has only transparent window background

From: Adrian Robert <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 4 Apr 2009 12:11:00 +0545

On Mar 29, 2009, at 5:11 AM, David Reitter wrote:

> Adrian, should we change this to match the Carbon Emacs default?
> Your ns-compatibility-mode (forgot exact name) could change that,  
> of course, but without it, we don't have too many Mac like keys  
> bound.  Traditional Emacs users tend to want a Meta key, while most  
> users of non-English keyboard layouts will need Option very  
> regularly to do tasks often done in Emacs {like C/Java/...  
> programming}.

Hi,

I will just give my thoughts on this, but since this port is a  
community project it is not necessarily my decision what to do.

The reason to prefer command = command is that emacs can then use  
similar accelerator keybindings to other os x apps.  The reason to  
prefer command = meta is that emacs can use similar non-ascii latin  
character entry to other os x apps.  Which is preferred for a given  
user depends on two questions:

1) is the user in continental Europe?
2) is the user editing code or text?

Why (2)?  Now that I've been living on the continent myself for a  
while, I've noticed that programmers here often just use a US  
keyboard layout even if they have a physically non-US keyboard.  It's  
just too much of a hassle to get commonly-needed special characters  
otherwise.

So my feeling is that the command=meta option is preferred by text- 
writing Continentals, while command = command is likely preferred by  
everyone else.  I am not sure which group makes up a larger subset of  
OS X emacs users.

I do know that I received a few complaints over the years from folks  
disliking the Emacs.app command=command default.  My answer was  
always to rehash the above and note that it's easy to change it --  
just flip a combo box in the prefs panel.  Now that it's not so easy  
(I guess figuring out the existence of ns/mac-command-modifier  
variable and writing suitable elisp to .emacs is necessary), the  
default setting becomes more important.

>> Could be done, but I think we should stick to one default for all  
>> layouts.
>>
>
> Then the system's one. No artificial changes.

I agree with both of these.  So perhaps the best default would be  
command=command (super), alt=none, and the user can set a meta key  
(additional to esc+) if he/she desires.

-Adrian