[craigching]

> Command instead of Control for shortcuts

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it sounds like you're using one of the Mac OSX ports of emacs that tries to make emacs behave more like a Mac app. My advice is don't do that. Use emacsformacos.com [1]. It's plain ol' GNU emacs built for the Mac platform. I was so glad to find this and quickly gave up Aquamacs. I want my emacs to behave the same whether I'm on Mac or Linux (or Windows for that matter, but I'm doing less and less on Windows these days).

Let me know if I've misunderstood you!

[1] -- http://emacsformacosx.com/

[aaronem]

You've misunderstood me; my Emacs is a custom-built 24.3.1 with the railwaycat patch for OS X, so it behaves exactly as I intend it to. (All of my Emacsen are hand-built; I learned back in my Perl-hacking days not to trust packagers beyond a certain level of complexity, which Emacs vastly exceeds.) The problem isn't Emacs, but rather everything else.

To expand on that point: what I'm complaining about is the fact that OS X, and native apps, use the Command key, which is where Alt would be on a PC keyboard, as the meta key for shortcuts which on a Windows or Linux box are bound to Control. This is a terrible idea from a UX perspective in general, because every common keybinding requires a hand cramp to invoke. From the special perspective of someone who remaps Caps Lock to Control, it's even worse.

I'm probably going to end up remapping Caps Lock to Command instead, and reconfiguring Emacs and iTerm accordingly; it looks like that'll work out to be a pretty complete solution to the problem. (I hadn't previously thought to check whether iTerm supports meta remapping, but it does, so I can have my Command key behave as Control when I use it in terminal applications.)