trying to set things up so i can 'ssh -X' among machines in my lan, and
then load emacs in gui mode [not emacs -nw] on the host machine [this is
NOT an emacs question;]

first i want to fix it so i use only the bash shell and only the Xterm
terminal emulator, no matter which defaults are set for the os or window
manager i'm dealing with;

on my ubuntu and slackware machines, i'm dealing with the default
terminal emulators gnometerm and konsole , respectively; both os's use
bash as the default shell

so, i attach Xterm to a keyboard shortcut to get Xterm/bash [confirmed
by 'echo $TERM' , 'echo $SHELL' ];

i also want to use readline customizations in my shell's command line;

so i have configured ~/.inputrc:
M-h is one of my emacs customizations; here it is in .initrc for
Readline:
-------------------------------------------------------------
$if mode=emacs
-------------------------snip-------------------------------------
"\M-h": backward-delete-char

# why won't these work? -v is moribund; -g > ls lists;
#"\M-g": forward-delete-char
#"\M-v": forward-delete-word
-----------------snip-------------------------------------------
$endif
-------------------------------------------------------------------

also: i put the following line in my
~/.bashrc:

export INPUTRC=/home/hodgson/.inputrc

PROBLEM:

Readline works in... [i.e. .inputrc is sourced by ...] KDE/Xterm/bash;

but not in Gnome/Xterm/bash [it DID work in Gnome/Gnometerm/bash]

as i understand it: on the ubuntu box [Xterm/bash] bash isn't getting
the right escape sequences from Xterm [but on the slackware box they
come thru konsole];

is this the critical matter? what does that mean, and, what do i do?

thanks, imputerate

This may just be a problem with the Meta key binding in xterm.

Try setting up a key binding that doesn't require Meta, and then see if that works.