Originally, I thought “meta” came from Mac land, and was the curlicue that they get instead of the windows button on many PC keyboards.
I’ve also often seen a quip that emacs stands for “Escape Meta Alt Control Shift” - I’m a vim user, so I never thought too hard about this, but emacs definitely refers to the Alt key as “Meta”, which makes that a contradiction in terms.
I guess all the nomenclature is just made up and nothing matters…
At least in macos the key you’re thinking of is called command, not meta. The history of the key names is that originally the space cadet keyboard had 4 modifier keys, control, meta, super, and hyper. When emacs was originally written it was aimed at this keyboard with those modifers. When using a PC keyboard emacs often mapped meta to alt and nothing for super until the windows key was introduced by Microsoft which made it a natural option for super and so the hyper key is the only one that totally died off.
This confused me, too.
Originally, I thought “meta” came from Mac land, and was the curlicue that they get instead of the windows button on many PC keyboards.
I’ve also often seen a quip that emacs stands for “Escape Meta Alt Control Shift” - I’m a vim user, so I never thought too hard about this, but emacs definitely refers to the Alt key as “Meta”, which makes that a contradiction in terms.
I guess all the nomenclature is just made up and nothing matters…
At least in macos the key you’re thinking of is called command, not meta. The history of the key names is that originally the space cadet keyboard had 4 modifier keys, control, meta, super, and hyper. When emacs was originally written it was aimed at this keyboard with those modifers. When using a PC keyboard emacs often mapped meta to alt and nothing for super until the windows key was introduced by Microsoft which made it a natural option for super and so the hyper key is the only one that totally died off.