Re: Using ALT in applications

[Ole Laursen <olau hardworking dk>]

>> I use KDE over Gnome for one reason (otherwise, I find them about the same).
>> In my default KDE installation (Mandrake 7.2 is the latest version), I can
>> use e.g. Alt-F in Emacs and the Alt binding "gets through". In Gnome/Sawfish,
>> it does not - pressing ALT causes a title bar change but it's not passed on
>> to the app.
> 
> I'm fairly new to sawfish, but I believe what you're after is in the
> sawfish "Bindings" controls.  You can access that from gnomecc or the
> customize menu option in the middle-button root menu.

Yeah, open up the control panel, scroll down to Sawfish and it should
be there. If you have a Windows keyboard, here comes a cool tip:

The idea is to rebind the keys with the ugly Micros~1 flags on them to
the hyper key (a strange key which exists on some X terminal keyboards
- works like Alt or Ctrl). This key can then be used in all
keybindings for the window manager instead of meta; thus you avoid all
the annoying clashes between the keys the individual applications use,
and the ones that the wm grabs.

First make sure that your keyboard isn't setup by X to have 104/105
keys. The setting is stored in /etc/X11/XF86Config (or perhaps
XF86Config-4) - if you can find something about 104/105 in the
keyboard section, change it to 101/102. Red Hat doesn't change the
default (which is 101/102) but I don't know about the other
distributions.

Next, insert the following into a .Xmodmap in your home directory:

  clear Mod4
  keycode 115 = Hyper_L
  keycode 116 = Hyper_R
  add Mod4 = Hyper_L
  add Mod4 = Hyper_R

Now run

  xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap

(or restart X), and you're for the next step.

Start the GNOME Control Panel and go the bindings page under
Sawfish. There you change all bindings which begin with 'M-' to begin
with 'H-' et voila!


Note that I've only tried this on Danish keyboards, but it *should*
work and if you experience any trouble, it's easy to revert the
changes.

In my .Xmodmap I've also got

  keycode 117 = slash

  keysym k = k K braceleft
  keysym l = l L braceright
  keysym i = i I bracketleft
  keysym o = o O bracketright
  keysym f = f F less
  keysym g = g G greater

I don't know whether they are terrible useful with English keyboard
setups, but with the Danish one they put the slash / on the remaining
Windows key, and various paranthesis (i.e. '[]{}<>') which are used a
lot in e.g. LaTeX in a very useful place (AltGr + key).

-- 
Ole Laursen 
http://sunsite.dk/olau/