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Alt (assuming you actually mean Meta ;) is completely unnecessary for emacs. Meta-<Key> can always be produced by pressing ESC <Key>

I guess technically ctrl is also unnecessary since you could type out whole commands with M-x (ESC x command). It wouldn't be fun, but you could do it.

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Although most keyboards nowadays use Alt for Meta, they were distinct keys on some older keyboards. I personally never used an MIT Lisp machine, but I have used Sun keyboards with a Meta key.

It's also fun to note that EMACS is an acronym for Escape Meta Alt Control Shift, which generally describes the experience of using it.

As joke acronyms go, I preferred "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping" back when Eight Megs was a lot of memory. "Eighty Megs" worked for a while after that. These days you'd have to rename it EGACS to use that joke.

Actually, it stood for "Editing MACroS" [1]. There are other expansions though -- see [2] below.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-faq.html#Origin-of-t...

[2] http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/gnuemacs.acro.exp.html

Also there is the totally useless capslock key, it could be mapped to meta just fine ^_^

See point 1 on Steve Yeggies's list of things to consider with emacs.

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs

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