Re: setting gdk display

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

Owen wrote:

>The definition that GTK+ makes: MOD1 *is* Alt (the modifier used
>for accelerator bindings, etc.) works much better than any attempt to
>look at the keysym does.
>
>Everybody wants Mod1 to pop up their menus, virtually everyone has
>Mod1 immediately adjacent to the spacebar. But sometimes that key
>is Alt, sometimes it is Meta.

As I see it, and as the original X Window docs see it on my reading,
Mod1 is NOT a key and Mod1 is most definitely not a position on a
keyboard. Mod1 is a just a semantic-free tag bound by a user to a
key. GTK doesn't make the definition that "Mod1 is Alt". It defines
Mod1 as the modifier used for certain operations. I can bind another
key to Mod1, and presto, it now does the same things that any other
key bound to Mod1 does. There is no special relationship between Alt
and Mod1 other than a convention that seems to have emerged in XFree86
and/or distributions that this should be the default binding when X
starts up. That convention could be broken next week by XFree86 or a
distributor and GDK could do (almost) nothing about it.

>Alt would not be a virtual modifier, because that just creates more
>problems than it solves.
>
>The interesting virtual modifiers are Super and Hyper. (We'd also have
>NumLock and ScrollLock because they are easy to do, if less useful.)

i generally find persistent modifier keys to be more or less useless
as modifiers. and in fact they quite often cause problems sometimes by
confusing users: "why isn't this key working the way it used to?"
(this is very noticeable in emacs; accidentally press numlock, and all
of a sudden many of your finger-memorized keystrokes in emacs cease to
work).