No, fix vim instead.
"Meta sets 8th bit" is so obviously and totally broken, since it maps
onto real characters, and has been doing so for at least 20 years.
Meta-L maps onto LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH GRAVE, both in 8-bit mode
and in your proposed UTF-8 mode. It just becomes even more obvious how
unbelievably broken it is when you try to map it onto UTF-8.
Seriously, fix the crap.
-hpa
--