Problem getting Alt/Opt-W to work (Mac)

MATLAB is not capturing the Alt/Opt key. I'm trying to get Alt-W to work as the Copy command in the editor window, but instead it just inserts a capital sigma. In fact none of the Alt-key combinations seem to work, they just insert the alternate character as defined by OS X.

Screen shot of my key bindings.

Cmd-C works fine.

The frustrating part is that the Alt-key commands worked last week. Then I re-installed the OS and MATLAB on my laptop and now I can't get it to work.

Anyone have suggestions?

MATLAB version R2012a, 7.14.0.739

MacBook Pro running 10.6.8

Answer 1

[Jason Ross]

When you reinstalled, did you pick another language or keyboard layout?

If you open up a text document and enter the same key combinations, do you get the same characters as you do in MATLAB?

[Jeff Meunier]

I went with English with the US keyboard layout, or whatever the precise default options were for that.

If I use any other application like TextEdit or Terminal and type Alt-W, it also shows a capital sigma character. So the OS is not passing the Alt key press to Matlab.

[Jason Ross]

I'm not very familiar with how the mac handles accessibility related things, but I know I've seen "weird" stuff on Windows when some of those features get activated (especially the StickyKeys). You might want to see if something got activated by mistake.

My wife also had a "alt" key problem on her netbook. We went all over the place trying to figure it out and it turns out that the keyboard was defective and would sometimes stick. I diagnosed that by using an external keyboard and discovering that the stickiness didn't happen then. It would be a pretty quick test if you have another keyboard hanging around.

[Jeff Meunier]

It's not the keyboard. I just tried a USB keyboard and I get the same result. Nevertheless, this is the proper behavior of a Mac keyboard for Mac applications: Alt-W inserts a ∑, similarly Alt-P inserts a π, and there are others.

The mystery I can't figure out is why Alt-W was Alt-W last week, and this week it's ∑ (yes, yes, I reinstalled the OS). But what changed? It's something non-obvious. If it were Linux I'd say that MATLAB was somehow receiving cooked keys from the terminal and not raw keys, but this is not Linux and it's not the terminal. In Emacs on the Mac I have to state that the Alt key is the Meta key to get it to work, and that's sort of the same problem in MATLAB. But MATLAB doesn't have a setting like this.

Answer 2

[Catrin]

In EMACS, go to 'options -> option, command and meta keys -> option is meta'. This worked for me.