<p> As I&#39;ve mentioned before, the first systems on which I used Emacs had keyboard support that was spotty-to-nonexistent for anything but the most common keystrokes.</p> <p> Consequently, I learned to use <code class="verbatim">ESC</code> for a lot of stuff where you&#39;d use <code class="verbatim">Meta</code>. For most of those things I&#39;ve retrained myself, but until I was actually reading the GNU Emacs Manual, I didn&#39;t know that you didn&#39;t have to hit <code class="verbatim">ESC</code> to do a numerical argument.</p>