Re: [PATCH] Remove ncurses meta() call.

"Kevin J. McCarthy" <[email protected]> Thu, 25 Jun 2026 20:50:09 +0800

Newsgroups	gmane.mail.mutt.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On Thu, Jun 25, 2026 at 02:17:17PM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
>On 2026-06-25 18:30:14 +0800, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote:
>> Ah, I figured out what foot is doing with meta enabled, (and xterm without
>> any metaSendsEscape settings).
>>
>> If I type Alt-p, the terminal converts 'p', 0x70, to 0xF0, by flipping the
>> high bit.  But then it encodes that in utf-8 and sends that to mutt. So mutt
>> receives 0xC3 0xB0 in two getch() calls.
>
>The goal in the past was to get non-ASCII characters with the Meta key
>on terminals where this was the only possibility.
>
>https://marc.info/?l=mutt-dev&m=97266015119280&w=3

Thanks Vincent.  This at least explains why it was originally enabled.

>This could have been useful with a 8-bit character set. With Unicode,
>this is very limited (it seems that one can only get characters from
>latin1).
>
>> It's a mess.  Mutt has no business enabling this mode, and $meta_key isn't a
>> solution since it goofs up typing utf-8 at the prompt.
>
>$meta_key actually does the reverse: convert 8-bit bytes to
>ESC + ASCII character. So one can no longer enter non-ASCII
>characters. IMHO, this is completely obsolete and should
>probably be removed to avoid useless code bloat.

Okay, I will remove $meta_key in master.

>> I'm actually pondering pushing this commit to stable and releasing
>> it with 2.4.1. Feedback?
>
>I think that this would be OK to remove the call to meta() in stable
>too. It could do more harm (e.g. with "foot") than solve problems
>nowadays.

I think we're on the same page. :-)  I'll wait to see if anyone else has 
feedback, but will plan on committing this to stable and getting a 2.4.1 
release out soon-ish.

-- 
Kevin J. McCarthy
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