Bug#651035: please decide how terminals should report Alt+letter combinations

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Russ Allbery wrote:

> My initial reaction is that I want to see a more compelling justification
> for standardizing anything here.

I don't think it's any more or less confusing than delete-versus-
backspace behavior.  For an example of what went wrong in the past
that prompted me to suggest adding some documentation to prevent it
happening again, see [1].

To be explicit, the goals in user-visible behavior are:

 1. Applications should all behave the same way wrt handling of the
    Meta key in terminals.  Advertising the smm capability makes that
    basically impossible.

 2. It should be possible to type Meta+letter keys in the default
    configuration.

The second goal seems less important to me than the first.  Maybe this
proposal should be narrowed to just focus on (1).  Both seem useful,
though.

Thanks for the quick feedback.

Ciao,
Jonathan

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=69;bug=574396