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

Kurt Hackenberg <[email protected]> Sun, 28 Jun 2026 16:54:54 -0400
Newsgroups gmane.mail.mutt.devel
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Sun, Jun 28, 2026 at 17:25 +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:

>If the 8th bit is interpreted as being Meta, then it is no longer
>possible to have non-ASCII characters in input.

Sure, but not everybody needs non-ASCII characters.

I'm in the US, don't often need even accent marks, much less the Greek 
alphabet. I used xterm and Emacs that way for years, with ASCII and 
with Meta encoded as the 8th bit. Don't think I ever used ISO-8859-*.

That's in the past for me. Now I use the locale C.UTF-8, so xterm can 
send Unicode, and the xterm setting metaSendsEscape, so Meta is 
converted to an Escape prefix. Occasionally I use an X mechanism to 
type a non-ASCII Unicode character, like this: é.

Of course, in the X window system, Meta is a genuine modifier, separate 
from characters, so it works fine, including when Emacs is an X client. 
Meta only becomes a problem when squeezed through a terminal emulator.

I get the impression the world is moving toward Unicode, but I don't 
know much. Is that happening in Europe?