On Thu, Jun 25, 2026 at 02:17:17PM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
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
Thanks Vincent. This at least explains why it was originally enabled.
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.
Okay, I will remove $meta_key in master.
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.
I think we're on the same page. :-) I'll wait to see if anyone else has feedback, but will plan on committing this to stable and getting a 2.4.1 release out soon-ish.
-- Kevin J. McCarthy GPG Fingerprint: 8975 A9B3 3AA3 7910 385C 5308 ADEF 7684 8031 6BDA
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