Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2021 May 11

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May 11

Emacs under X11 and MacOS Big Sur

I'm running my Emacs under X11 on macOS. Because I started using Emacs on X11R2 or so under SunOS, and there is no reason to change. Ever. Now I've made the mistake to upgrade to macOS Big Sur (11.3.1 at the moment). And suddenly, Emacs does not register any keypress for C-SPC (Control key + Space bar), which is very annoying, because that is supposed to run set-mark-command, something my finger memory does automatically. I don't know if that is an X11 problem or an Emacs problem, but can anyone give me a hint? I vaguely remember that there is a tool for showing all X events, but forgot the name... --Stephan Schulz (talk) 10:22, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

I can't help you with X11, because I always use emacs in plain-terminal mode. One possible workaround -- I'm not saying it's a good one, but I remember having to use on one broken terminal years ago -- is to use C-@ instead. (A clumsy workaround at best, and annoying on the muscle memory front, I agree. I don't know about you, but my left pinkie finger has gotten rather tired of the peregrinations of the ESC and CTRL keys over the years, and I decided to forego the purchase of a Powerbook with the otherwise nice Touch Bar, because on that keyboard ESC wasn't a key at all!) —Steve Summit (talk) 10:59, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. Yes, I found that out (and I can also run M-X set-mark-command), but it does not come easily to my fingers - not from muscle memory, but also physically. I'm not Paganini ;-). --Stephan Schulz (talk) 13:31, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

The tool to show X11 events is xev. You can create an emacs window, get its id with xwininfo, and then pass that id to xev -id to trace the events for it. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 12:25, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

That was useful. It's an X11 problem - no X-event for the key-combo at all. Now I can dig more localised. Thanks! --Stephan Schulz (talk) 13:31, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

So it's an XY problem, for Y = 11.  --Lambiam 09:28, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

Turns out it's a macOS-problem. This solved it for me. Live is better again! --Stephan Schulz (talk) 15:11, 11 May 2021 (UTC)