Re: X 4.1.0 Hints for french PowerBook users...
On Tue, 2001-09-04 at 00:08, Florent Pillet wrote:
> on 3/09/01 19:28, Tuomas Kuosmanen at tigert@ximian.com wrote:
>
> > This has the effect of making []{} etc to work. However, it disables ALT
> > for me (though I tried it on the finnish/swedish keymap) - thus you
> > cannot Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill the X server, nor can you use Alt for
> > anything (alt-drag to move windows for example on many window managers)
> >
> > Tuomas
>
> Interesting.
>
> I'm not an expert with this keyboard configuration yet. Since xkb setting
> files seem to be under-documented, I'm trying to make my way through them.
I hear you... It is a pain to try to do something with the keyboard
files, I havent found much docs, and not many people seem to know about
them. And most of the people who might know, are in the US and thus dont
have these issues... The US keymap of course works..
> I'm trying to find a fix for this. The default X mappings for Mac keyboards
> are not perfect since I think ALT is misused (the Command key should be used
> instead). Therefore, I wonder if it would not be more appropriate to use the
> Command key as "Alt_L" and leave the Alt key for what it is really used
> under MacOS, that is access additional characters on the various keys.
I have been thinking about this too. I think we have a lot of different
opinions about this. This changed when we moved to linux keycodes, I
think Cmd-key used to be ALT with ADB keycodes.
Yet another interesting analogy with MacOS would be to use Cmd as Ctrl.
It works much like Ctrl on MacOS (Cmd-X/C/V for cut-copy-paste vs.
Ctrl-X/C/V on PC world) - though I am not sure if this is practical. It
is an interesting thought for a person who switches a lot between Macos
(under MacOnLinux) and Linux. I find myself mixing those keys a lot
after I switch from the MOL console to Linux and back.. But I agree this
is not the way to do, as Ctrl is Ctrl in the Unix world.
The way I "fixed" this for myself: I noticed that Fn-Alt was
"Mode_Switch" in the new X 4.1 stuff. This works okay, one just needs to
press Fn-Alt-9 to get "]" on the finnish keymap. Or that is how it
should work in theory. In practice pressing the Fn key kicks in the
keypad emulation, and "9" key changes to "KP_9" (numeric keypad 9, same
happens with all keys that are inside the keypad emulation area, the
yellow marks on the powerbook keyboard). And Mode_Switch + KP_9 does
nothing by default. So my kludge was to use this little script to add
the additional characters to those keycodes that replace the ones if you
press Fn:
% cat keymapfix.sh
xmodmap -e "keycode 79 = KP_7 KP_Home bar backslash"
xmodmap -e "keycode 80 = KP_8 KP_Up bracketleft braceleft"
xmodmap -e "keycode 81 = KP_9 KP_Prior bracketright braceright"
This works for me on the fi/se keyboard.
Now it might be also possible to do something with the keyboard
modifiers (Mod1, Mod2 etc..), but I dont yet quite understand how they
work, but I wonder if it might be possible to have Alt_L (the current
Alt key) to also act as Mode_Switch. Maybe, I dont know yet. In that
case we wouldnt need the Fn, and thus the above would not be a problem.
However this was the first solution for me, I can now use the keyboard
fully to get things done (just as you did with your hack as well)
Best wishes,
Tuomas
--
:: :: Tuomas Kuosmanen :: Art Director, Ximian :: ::
:: :: tigert@ximian.com :: www.ximian.com :: ::
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