OSX Terminals

I'm still looking for a good OS-X terminal. The major problem with Terminal.app is that after poking around, I'm only able to get the meta-key as alt/option. Of course, my carbonized emacs uses the clover leaf for meta so if I'm sshing somewhere and using emacs and using it locally too, I'll end up typing clover-leaf commands at Terminal.app which causes it to do funny things. There are programs that switch alt/option and clover leaf, but they do it globally. I just need to switch it per window, but I don't know how.

I'm trying to avoid installing X-Windows on my mac because of the problems I seem to have with it (namely that it is very slow to start and its windows don't seem to get integrates into the aqua ui for things like clover-leaf tab.

Update: I built my own version of iTerm hacked so that both Alt and Option act as a "Meta" key. It works pretty well though I've mostly resorted to using XWindows when logging in from home because I have better control over the colors.

I'd like to formally complain that the people who came up with ANSI coloring for terminals didn't do something smart like being able to query the terminal for the RGB triples it supports (of course with a shorthand for any) and be able to then specify colors by RGB triples when drawing.

Bold, italic, underlining, and strike-through, would be nice too. (A single fixed width font is fine however, after all, it is only a terminal, not a web-browser.)