Diacritic marks in emacs for macOS

Question

I've run in a problem when I wanted to use diacritic marks (ąęśćłóżź) in the emacs for mac.

Usually, to get them I use the right option key ⌥ along with the character I want to enter (⌥+aesclozx respectively) which is the most common way of inputting the Polish diacritic marks. But on macs keyboard it is no distinction between left and right option key ⌥ as it is in Win (Alt and Alt+Gr). As everyone has already predicted, the emacs command mode/prompt got activate.

I did research on web but I'm getting answers which are not specific enough.

Therefore, my question is: What is the less invasive method to achieve as follow:

1. to be able to insert Polish diacritic marks using right ⌥,
2. to be able to trigger emacs command mode/prompt using left ⌥

Or the closest possible solution.

Just to mention that on rest of my mac entering diacritic marks works without any problem, so I don't want to install any key-remapping app just for purpose of emacs.

Can I configure it natively either in emacs or in macOS?

Answer 1

But on macs keyboard it is no distinction between left and right option key ⌥ as it is in Win (Alt and Alt+Gr).

Yes, there is.

You have the variables ns-alternate-modifier and ns-right-alternate-modifier. If you want the left option key to act as meta and the right option key to be passed through to macOS so that you can type those characters, you can do

(setq ns-alternate-modifier 'meta
      ns-right-alternate-modifier 'none)