Re: Alt and Meta (Was: Nautilus bugs and design choices)

[David Moles <david moles vykor com>]

On Thu, 2002-07-11 at 14:55, Gregory Merchan wrote:
> 
> Just to be more clear here. What I was confused about the claims of
> conflicts with applications. Those claims are being made so that all
> window manager keybindings are pushed onto the Meta key. I am very much
> against that - at least now, at least until more than Shift, Control, and
> Alt is as commonplace as those are now.

I have a 104-key keybaord. It has Ctrl, Shift, Alt, two Windows keys
(which xkeycaps/xmodmap calls "=/+/" -- keycodes 0x73 and 0x74) and 
some sort of "menu" key (whixh xkeycaps/xmodmap calls "##" -- keycode
0x75).

I've used xmodmap to remap "Windows" to "Alt" and "Alt" to "Meta"
(after a failed attempt to do the reverse).

* Emacs treats Alt as "Meta", and appears to ignore Windows ("Alt").
  (I can't test this because I don't know of anything I ought to be
  able to do in Emacs with Alt as opposed to Meta.)

* Evolution treats Alt as "Alt" -- ignoring the custom keymap, as
  far as I can tell -- and appears to ignore Windows.

* My Java-based IDE treats Windows as "Alt" -- following the
  custom keymap and appears to ignore Alt.

I'm not making any claims about what should be done with window
manager keybindings; I'm just complaining. :)

--David

(P.S. This is all with the most recent Ximian stable release of
Gnome, running on RH 7.1 with the most recent updated packages
from RedCarpet, except for Emacs which is version 21.1, probably
from Rawhide or someplace.)