Re: Alt and Command keys in the quartz backend

[John Ralls <jralls ceridwen us>]

On Sep 6, 2011, at 9:58 AM, Paul Davis wrote:

> 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.

Actually, that was last changed by Richard Hult in 2008 [1], about 6 months before I got involved.

I think I'd go further and require that the MODX masks be made private to GDK before I'd agree that it's moot. Even with the MOD1 hardcoding in Gtk removed there are still lots of other cases running around, and we'd still get complaints like Michael's that it's somehow broken. 

Regards,
John Ralls



[1] http://git.gnome.org/browse/gtk+/commit/gdk?id=31357d3cc7d37e5b0fe674835406c255a961a358