In redhat releases and in other operating systems, a default xterm window will provide me with a shell wherein <alt>-<delete> will backward delete a word, <alt>-b, will move the cursor backward a word, <alt>-f will move forward a word, etc. That is, emacs editing mode works and acts on the meta keys.
This doesn't work on fedora core 3, at least not out of the box. Can anyone explain to me what I need to do to get my meta key editing back, please? Or point me to relevant documentation that might help me figure out what's going on?
Thsi had me puzzled too. It turns out that the newer xterm code has UTF-8 enabled by default. This screws up Alt-x in emacs running in an xterm, for example, as it inserts a weird character. After some research into this, this is what I settled on - place the following in .Xresources in your home directory. Do look at the URL mentioned in the comment though. Note also you'll have to do xrdb -merge .Xresources once you've edited .Xresources.
!Quick fix for the Alt/Meta problem !XTerm*metaSendsEscape: true
!Better fix for the Alt/Meta problem !See http://www.leonerd.org.uk/programming/hints/xterm-8bit.html !See also .inputrc XTerm*utf8: 1 XTerm*eightBitInput: false XTerm*eightBitControl: false XTerm*eightBitOutput: true
