emacs: remapping the meta key

I recently started using Emacs on my mac and one of the things that was bothering me immediately was the Meta key. By default, meta is assigned to the Alt key — but that’s not on a modern Mac’s keyboard, which meant that I was forced to use the ESC key as my Meta.¹

Fortunately, there are ways to remap the keys within Emacs - I just needed to figure out how.

When I first installed Emacs via Homebrew (the current recommendation appears to be to use the Cask version), I went looking for a .emacs or one of the other standard files that Emacs uses for an Initialization File.

When I couldn’t find one, I decided, similar to a .zshrc or .bashrc, I could create my own. Once I did that, it was just a matter of figuring out how to remap the keys, and for that, there’s pretty good guidance within the Emacs tutorial, but what I found was the following:

(setq mac-option-modifier 'meta) ; set alt-key to meta
(setq mac-escape-modifier nil) ; set esc-key to nil

The second line is not strictly necessary I suppose. It wouldn’t hurt to have two meta keys, but this means that the ESC key is now free to be remapped.

Just like that, I was able to remap keys within Emacs and specifically the meta key!

Footnotes

• ¹ According to this Stack Overflow answer, Meta is converted to ESC by Emacs by default.