M- commands no longer pass through

Wed Feb 20 10:34:53 CET 2013

On 2013-02-20, Eric S Fraga <e.fraga at ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> in the past week sometime, give or take, the default behaviour of evil
> seems to have change with respect to any key bindings *not* in the
> standard (normal, insert) maps.  I first noticed this when trying to
> type M-q while writing; this key is globally bound to
> maybe-fill-paragraph, my own function.  Now even M-x doesn't work.  I have
> to switch to emacs mode first.
>
> The annoying thing is that C-h c M-q says
>
>   M-q runs the command maybe-fill-paragraph
>
> but hitting M-q gives
>
>   M-q is undefined
>
> Similar behaviour is observed for M-x, M-; and M-:, all of which are
> quite hard-coded into my emacs fingers and have no immediate evil
> equivalents in any case...
>
> Is there a change in the default configuration I have missed?  I have
> gone through the git log but haven't noticed anything specific.  I am
> using evil version 1.0-Devi.  Is there a variable I can tweak to allow
> these keystrokes to go through?

The default behaviour of Evil did not change, at least not that I know of ;)

May I ask which Emacs version you use? 24.3.1 or so?

If this is the case, then I've realised this problem, too, two days or
so ago. This problem only occurs in X mode, in terminal everything
works fine. But we did not change anything w.r.t. to the escape key. I
tried with viper and the same problem occurred. It seems as if the
Emacs people changed something that makes trouble with the ESC key
work-around for terminals (viper and evil use more or less the same
trick).

In the meantime you could disable the ESC workaround of evil (untested):

(define-key evil-esc-map (kbd "ESC") nil)

but then ESC in terminal mode won't work anymore.

Currently I do not know what to do. I haven't look yet if there's
already a bug report (or even a fix) for viper.

Frank