What on earth does the backspace key do?

It's bound to the help function. Pretty dumb idea. Put the following in your .emacs file:

(define-key global-map "\C-h" 'backward-delete-char)
and you have a backspace that deletes like God intended it to.

Want a right-control key?

There are a few utilities that remap option/command/function/control keys. Unfortunately, with 10.2 none of them seem to work for our purposes. Checkout uControl, CommandAndControl, and DoubleCommand; they may have been amended since I wrote this.

Here's what works: put the following 

clear Control
clear Mod1
keycode 67 = Alt_L
add Mod1 = Alt_L
keycode 66 = Control_L
add Control = Control_L
in a file .swapcontrol, and put 
xmodmap $HOME/.swapcontrol
in your .xinitrc file. After any other xmodmaps there may already be.

This will swap option and control, provided these are bound to key 66 and 67, which they are on my PowerBook. To test what they are on your machine, type xev, which will open a window that shows you ever message that goes through X. Hit some keys and observe the result.

Pasting from Aqua

In xterms and various other applications, Option-click works to paste something that you cut in Aqua. To make this work in emacs fink install autocutsel and add a line autocutsel & to your .xinitrc so that it starts up automatically.

This file is part of Victor Eijkhout's OS X notes.