Meta key in emacs on osx 10.6.1

I recently decided to get back to using emacs again and was very frustrated with the meta key. I searched and searched around trying to find something better than using [escape] key as meta. Eventually it dawned on me to look at my terminal preferences where I discovered the secret. There is a box you can select "use option as meta" that has made my life easier. I posted this for anyone else on the wiki: emacs wiki just in case anyone else is interested.

The fix above worked well for terminal emacs. For carbon emacs, you may have to add the following to your init.el file:

(setq mac-option-modifier 'meta)

as per: this post