this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2026
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Man, it sure is confusing that apparently some software calls the super key meta. Historically that's alt and a lot of software calls alt meta instead. My brain was bending over backwards reading this article, confused as to why alt and meta were being used simultaneously as though separate until I figured it out.
EDIT: lol, I just noticed apparently the KDE key remapper used meta in place of alt so we've got both uses of meta in the same article and the author went with the keyd definition...
This confused me, too.
Originally, I thought "meta" came from Mac land, and was the curlicue that they get instead of the windows button on many PC keyboards.
I've also often seen a quip that emacs stands for "Escape Meta Alt Control Shift" - I'm a vim user, so I never thought too hard about this, but emacs definitely refers to the Alt key as "Meta", which makes that a contradiction in terms.
I guess all the nomenclature is just made up and nothing matters...
At least in macos the key you're thinking of is called command, not meta. The history of the key names is that originally the space cadet keyboard had 4 modifier keys, control, meta, super, and hyper. When emacs was originally written it was aimed at this keyboard with those modifers. When using a PC keyboard emacs often mapped meta to alt and nothing for super until the windows key was introduced by Microsoft which made it a natural option for super and so the hyper key is the only one that totally died off.