Enable zsh using 8th bit as Meta without warning

Question

In my quest to configure my shell to work exactly how I want it with respect to the alt/meta key I am having some trouble. Recently I added "bindkey -m" to my .zshrc and now whenever I start a zsh shell (ie open a terminal window) I get this error "warning: `bindkey -m' disables multibyte support".

Now since I don't care much about multibyte support atm, is there a way I can disable just this warning? Even better would be a way to use 8th-bit meta as well as multibyte. Also note that this happens on a clean zsh install on 4.3.9 and 4.3.10

My reasoning for wanting bindkey -m

• vim: alt mappings (my own personal commands/mappings)
• zsh: alt mappings (such as Alt-. to recall the last argument of the previous command)
• emacs: alt mappings (lots of built-ins)

So, is there any way to disable this warning or otherwise accomplish what I'm trying to do?

Answer 1

You can sweep the message under the rug:

bindkey -m 2>/dev/null

Don't mappings to escape (\[) also work for Alt for you? Alt-. works for me, for example, by default.

Also, unless you're talking about the command line editing modes, vim and emacs handle their own keyboard mapping. Settings in zsh won't affect them.