changing the meta key in emacs

Meta key problems with emacs seem to be very common, especially on OSX where alt/option is used to input special characters by default.

If you are using AquamacsEmacs^{[Aquamacs Homepage]} or CarbonEmacsPackage, you may be able to set the modifier keys within your .emacs or other preferences file.

Specifically to map shift to meta, I'd try this (^{Note: this is untested}):

(setq mac-shift-modifier 'meta)

If that doesn't work, there may not be an easy way to remap shift in this fashion. You may need to look into the define-key function in emacs lisp.

Otherwise, if you're using emacs via the terminal, from homebrew, or some port of xemacs with XQuartz, you might want to look into using xmodmap