I'm trying to learn emacs and would like to use the super key on my keyboard for any meta commands in emacs, because I use dwm as my window manager and it uses the meta key extensively. I have read this page, using it to try
(setq x-meta-keysym 'super)
(setq x-super-keysym 'meta)
with no luck. Ideally I'd like to simply flip them, but only in emacs. when I inspect the variables x-meta-keysym and x-super-keysym with C-h v the commands do seem to be evaluated correctly. When I check the super key with the linux utility xev it confirms that the key I'm pressing is mapped to Super_L.
So, it turns out that the above commands work when emacs is not used in terminal mode. I had been trying it in the terminal exclusively which is why it wasn't working. I'm not sure how to fix it in the terminal, but it's good enough I suppose.
edit: it was the terminal emulator that was gobbling the keypresses before they got to emacs, so the original commands do work, so long as the keypress actually makes it to emacs.