Sort of side question, but why do you set the command key to be Emacs' meta key? I've sort of waffled on that myself -- the plus to doing it is that it matches Windows (which I am in too much of the time) and Linux, but the minus is that it not only breaks 20+ years of muscle memory I have with MacOS, it collides with a few other global hotkeys. (Recent collisions I've noticed are Alfred's clipboard manager, which defaults to Shift-Command-\ (M-|, shell-command-on-region), and the system-level screenshot hotkey on Shift-Command-5 (M-%, query-replace).

For the keys you don’t need to type quickly, M-x can also be typed as ESC x. For any character x.

So it works well with M-|, but not so well with M-f, for example.

Ah yes. I find the ⌘ key placement a little more ergonomic/convenient, but at the end of the day, pick whatever works for ya.

Thinking back, I prolly didn't use those two commands often enough to internalize M-| or M-% bindings, so the system-level handling didn't bother me. While I do replace things all the time, I typically use multiple cursors (I do use bindings for that). If I need querying, I just type `M-x que RET` which gets picked up by a completion frameworks (in my case ivy).

Relatedly, I also use Hammerspoon on macOS and set some global key bindings using the ⌥ key.