Meta and Alt keys
I had occasion today to be playing on a Sun Sparcstation which ran XDM with
the chooser. Out of curiosity, I entered my machine's address, and whoa!
it worked! So I was playing around on my own system from the Sun for a
little while, complete with the Sun's Unix keyboard, and discovered that
it's really handy to have a real Meta key in addition to an Alt. For one
thing, it works from xemacs (alt does not), and it eliminates the annoying
bug that fvwm2 has where the Alt key spontaneously quits being useful as a
panning/shortcut/windowmanager key and starts getting passed to programs.
I think it would be really handy to change my keymap (either in X or the
console, or both) so that Alt is an Alt key and the useless Win95 Start key
is a Meta key.
However, I haven't been able to find any accurate documentation on how to do
this. The Keyboard-and-Console-HOWTO on my system is dated 16 November 1997
and whatever it told me to do to change the default keymap for the console
(I tried this a month or two ago, just for kicks) didn't work; I could load
the new map manually but something else was being booted. The same for X: I
have seen several references to xmodmap, but have also seen that it is
defunct and has been replaced by something which is not named.
How would I do this? This also seems like something which would be helpful
as a system default, since so many newbies (me included) are putting Linux
on a < 3 year old Windows system.
Thanks,
Rob
--
Applause, n:
The echo of a platitude from the mouth of a fool.
-- Ambrose Bierce
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