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

Thomas Dickey <[email protected]> Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:42:33 -0400

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

On Thu, Jun 25, 2026 at 05:15:29PM -0400, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2026 at 08:50:09PM +0800, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> not really.  ncurses (and any implementation of X/Open Curses which supports
> meta) would get the actual setting from the terminal.  Regardless of xterm's
> eightBitInput setting, systems in use over the past 25-30 years (aside from
> antique Unixes which someone may have used as a student...) just set 8 bits
> in the terminal anyway.
> 
> Lacking specifics, all you can do is speculate.

more to the point: in 2000 (the quoted thread), the meta() call from mutt
had no effect on xterm because:

	a) there were no control sequences to activate it until 6 years later,

	b) ncurses was already using the terminal in 8-bit mode anyway

Roessler's setting of xterm's eightBitInput did have an effect, but
neither mutt nor ncurses configuration contributed to that effect.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <[email protected]>
https://invisible-island.net

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