ALT/meta problems

[Meino Christian Cramer <Meino.Cramer@gmx.de>]

Hi,

 I am using vim (console version, _not_ gvim) and mrxvt and of course
 zsh, newest stable version on a recent gentoo system.

 My problems are keycombinations like ALT-<key>.

 Either I start mrxvt as mrxvt and all ALT-<key> are mappes to
 <ESC>-<key>.

 When using keymappings in vim, which map a keytrstroke to nearly
 anthing you want, all mappings using M-<key> are ignored therefore.
 vim expsects ALT-<key>s to be in the range of 225-250 and not
 keycombos made from <ESC>-<key>. This is also Bram Molenaars, the
 author of vim, opinion of how it should be.

 Or I start mrxvt as 'mrxvt -m8' instructing mrxvt to generate single
 byte keyvalue for the meta-keys as exspected by vim. Then keymappings
 in vim of the kind described above do work...but I will loose (for
 example) the very handy feature of zsh: pressing ALT-. to get the last
 argument of the previous command. Zsh exspects <ESC>-<keys> sequences
 for the Meta-keys.

 Is there any way out of this disaster ?

 Kind regards,
 mcc