XTerm and meta

I'm using Cygwin and X11 on Windows 7, and I'm pretty happy with it so far. The newest version of Cygwin integrates nicely, and 7 seems pretty polished and much nicer overall than XP (I never really used Vista).

The one problem I've been having is related to the meta key in XTerm. I'm a heavy user of the Emacs movement keys, so M-b, M-f, M-a and friends see heavy use. However, in the default configuration, I get garbage and strange behaviour.

I finally found the fix in an old blog post from 2005. To summarize, the fix is to ctrl-left click and make sure that "meta sends escape" is selected. This can be made permanent by adding this to your .Xresources file:

XTerm*metaSendsEscape: true

To load that change without restarting X, run xrdb -override .Xresources.

Now to figure out what is wrong with X11 on Snow Leopard!

UPDATE: If adding the above your your .Xresources file does not work, try adding it to .Xdefaults instead. Alternatively, add xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources to your .xinitrc file.