Re: Alt and Command keys in the quartz backend

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 12:49 PM, Michael Natterer <mitch gimp org> wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-09-06 at 08:27 -0700, John Ralls wrote:

 [ ... imminent turf war ... ]

this seems to be about two different things, neither of which are in
conflict (and i think john actually agrees with this).

1) whether or not the Alt key should generate MOD1 as a modifier
2) whether or not code that wants to be cross-platform can assume that
they can use MOD1 with its own chosen semantics

the problem is that (2) includes GTK, not just applications, and GTK
already makes this assumption. as a result, john changed the modifier
that alt/option generates on OS X, because (2) is not true for OS X.

if (2) was fixed so that GTK was not an example of code that assumes
that MOD1 is free for any interpretation on any platform, then (1) is
moot, and it really doesn't matter what the Alt key generates on OS X
(hence, it could be MOD1).

but as long as (2) remains an issue within GTK itself, its hard to
argue that a key that has clearly different purposes for a large body
of platform users of OS X should be handled by GTK as if it had some
different meaning based on another platform.