MacOS – How to get the Alt key to work in an X11 application

Warning: this is not my final answer, it will take some time to provide a better one.

Tested on OS X 10.8.5 with XQuartz 2.7.4 (xorg-server 1.13.0) and:

• meld - installed via brew install meld
• xterm
• xclock

To tune the fonts create a file ~/.Xresources and put this:

Xft.dpi:        96
Xft.antialias:  true
Xft.hinting:    true
Xft.autohint:   true
Xft.rgba:       rgb
Xft.hintstyle:  hintfull

XTerm*faceName: DejaVu Sans Mono
*faceName: DejaVu Sans Mono

Inside ~/.gtkrc-2.0:

style "user-font" {
    font_name = "Lucida Grande 10"
}
widget_class "*" style "user-font"

gtk-font-name="Lucida Grande 10"
gtk-enable-mnemonics = 0

Feel free to post your modifications, as long they are using standard Fonts available on OS X, I would like to make this drop-in recipe.

The last file has an effect on meld and other gtk apps.

Note, the font is the same as the one used in OS X UI but the rendering is still a little bit different.

You probably need to step a level further down the tree of software and hardware, to the level of KyRemap4MacBook - which acts as a filter between the physical keyboard and the keyboard events reported to MacOS.

The software keyboard map is an optional thing - software can intercept keyboard events at a level that bypasses it, if they wish, and it sounds like some of what the browser does with key binding is touching on that.

A lower level remapping may bypass that problem.