EurKEY, MacOS and Emacs' Meta key

Back To The Mac 2

I am building my first custom Emacs configuration, moving away from Doom Emacs. Doom was great for getting started with Emacs after using Vim exclusively for the previous… 15 years?!

After the jump back to the Mac there were a number of new issues with my setup that I had no idea how to solve, and there’s so much magic happening in Doom that I didn’t really want to look too much into it. So I’m taking a step back and starting from scratch. Not really from scratch, because I am using Emacs Bedrock as a base config. But still.

Reading Mastering Emacs helped me a ton in finally understanding some core concepts like … windows, frames, M-x, …

Speaking of M-x.

One of my most important (tech/productivity) discoveries of the last 10 years is the EurKEY keyboard layout. In short, it let’s me use the ANSI/US keyboard layout for programming while also conveniently insert Umlauts and other accented characters. During my work day I mostly write in English and Ruby. Other times I often write German or Spanish. EurKEY let’s me do all of that very simply and in similar fashion in every operating systems I use: MacOS and GNU/Linux.

EurKEY requires the use of the Mac’s option key. Emacs also likes the option key. It’s called Meta there and is used in the most important command: Meta-x. If Emacs uses option for Meta, then it’s not forwarded to MacOS to be used in EurKEY.

The solution? Disable the option key and only re-enable the right option key to act as Meta.

(setq mac-option-modifier 'none)
(setq mac-right-option-modifier 'meta)

This way I can use the right option key for Emacs and the left one to write Umlauts.