Emacs weirdness at console

[Robert Storey]

On Mon, 19 May 2003 17:47:17 +0930
"Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog at FreeBSD.org> wrote:

> On Monday, 19 May 2003 at 15:34:02 +0800, Robert Storey wrote:
> > I'm a Linux refugee, and I confess to being new at FreeBSD.
> >
> > I've used Emacs a lot over the past few years under Linux. What I've
> > noticed in FreeBSD is that Emacs barely works at the console, yet it
> > works fine under X.
> 
> Are you having other problems than the one you describe?

Well, now that you ask...

Is there a utility in FBSD to turn on/off num_lock? Linux has one called
"setleds" but I don't see that in the ports collection.

I was going to ask you how to set the keyboard key rate, but your
suggestion below to look at the man page for kbdcontrol solved that one
for me. 

I installed "most" (from the ports collection), a much more colorful pager
for man pages than plain old "more." I figured out that I can use "most"
as a pager by doing this:

   man -P most <command>

The question is: how can I set "most" to be my default pager so I don't
have to type "-P most"?

I haven't yet found a FBSD equivalent to the Linux "Cryptoapi" program,
which allows one to encrypt a partition. Does anything like this exist
yet?

I'm still looking for a way to share a partition (on the same hard drive)
with Linux so I can exchange data - maybe that isn't possible. Doesn't
seem that FreeBSD supports ext2, and Linux doesn't support UFS. As far as
I know, the only way to exchange data is to use a second machine on the
network.

> > A crucial problem (in the console) is that the ALT key (or M- key in
> > Emacs parlance) just doesn't work at all.
> 
> The Meta (M-) key is not the Alt key.  If you want to use the Alt key
> as a Meta key, you need to tell the system to do so.

I stand corrected.

> > That's pretty major - without that key, about half the Emacs
> > commands are inaccessible.
> 
> No, that's not correct.  Hit Esc first, then the character.  That has
> always worked.

You're right again - except when you want to auto-repeat the command. Like
for example, M-f, to move forward one word. I'll often hold down M-f and
move forward 10 words or more. Trying doing that with ESC-f and it will
drive you crazy.   
 
> > The CTRL key (C- ) does work as expected. Again, in X, all is well
> > with Emacs.
> 
> Try loading the emacs key bindings:
> 
>  # kbdcontrol -l /usr/share/syscons/keymaps/us.emacs.kbd

Great, that worked like a charm.
 
> You can get the system to load this keymap automatically at boot time
> by putting the following line in your /etc/rc.conf:
> 
>   keymap="us.emacs.kbd"   # keymap in /usr/share/syscons/keymaps/* (or
>   NO).

This also worked wonders.

> See the man page for kbdcontrol(1) for more details.

Great, it has already proven useful!

And mucho thanks Greg for all your help!

regards,
Robert