On 2026-06-25 18:30:14 +0800, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote:
> Ah, I figured out what foot is doing with meta enabled, (and xterm without
> any metaSendsEscape settings).
> 
> If I type Alt-p, the terminal converts 'p', 0x70, to 0xF0, by flipping the
> high bit.  But then it encodes that in utf-8 and sends that to mutt. So mutt
> receives 0xC3 0xB0 in two getch() calls.

The goal in the past was to get non-ASCII characters with the Meta key
on terminals where this was the only possibility.

https://marc.info/?l=mutt-dev&m=97266015119280&w=3

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
List:       mutt-dev
Subject:    Re: PATCH more line editor functions
From:       Thomas Roessler <roessler () does-not-exist ! org>
Date:       2000-10-27 15:21:05

On 2000-10-27 16:09:17 +0100, Ian Collier wrote:

> (The above seems like a bit of a hack solution, however - but
> then again, if you want to allow the user to type "ć" in a curses
> application then you can't map M-f to a function so maybe it's
> the best solution in the circumstances.)

It's not a hack solution at all.  I'm typing in Umlauts daily on a
German keyboard, _and_ can use my keyboard's meta key with the
eightBitInput:false setting.
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

This could have been useful with a 8-bit character set. With Unicode,
this is very limited (it seems that one can only get characters from
latin1).

> It's a mess.  Mutt has no business enabling this mode, and $meta_key isn't a
> solution since it goofs up typing utf-8 at the prompt.

$meta_key actually does the reverse: convert 8-bit bytes to
ESC + ASCII character. So one can no longer enter non-ASCII
characters. IMHO, this is completely obsolete and should
probably be removed to avoid useless code bloat.

> I'm actually pondering pushing this commit to stable and releasing
> it with 2.4.1. Feedback?

I think that this would be OK to remove the call to meta() in stable
too. It could do more harm (e.g. with "foot") than solve problems
nowadays.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <[email protected]> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Pascaline project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)

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