I used to use Carbon Emacs on OS X for quite a while, but with the release of Emacs 24 I switched to the stock GNU Emacs distribution. While GNU Emacs works fine on OS X, once you throw a German keyboard layout in the mix it doesn’t work so well as OS X uses Option + Number keys for a variety of characters needed for programming like [] and {}. GNU Emacs uses Option as Meta out of the box so the key mapping doesn’t work overly well, especially if you do a lot of programming in the C family of languages.

I finally got fed up with this restriction as it seriously affected my enjoyment of cranking out code under OS X. A bit of duckduckgo’ing gave me the necessary settings to use Command as Meta and pass Option through to the underlying OS. From my slightly hazy memory, this was the default layout for Carbon Emacs.

Here’s the code that will switch the keys around:

(setq mac-command-modifier 'meta
      mac-option-modifier 'none
      default-input-method "MacOSX")

Yes, there is also the whole argument about the unsuitability of using a German keyboard layout for programming. A lot of German programmers I know switched to UK or US layout keyboards to make programming easier.

I can drive one of those keyboards if need be but I’m both a touch typist and I rely on Kinesis Advantage keyboards for my day-to-day work thanks to an injury from a less than ergonomic desk quite a few years back. While this old dog is generally happy to learn a new trick or three, I draw the line at switching keyboard layouts when there are other options available.