Re: Meta and Alt keys
Rob Mahurin <alphenglor@rhct093.res.utk.edu> writes:
| 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.
Hmm, I thought this was the default. I seem to distinctly remember
changing that around because I hated those d*mn Windows keys so much I
removed them from my keyboard! I'm using slink on my main system so
maybe that's the difference? Anyway, the "xkeycaps" program is your
friend in X! I think it's in it's own Debian package? It allows you to
define the keys anyway you want, save it to a file, and I think tells
you how to load it by default when you log in.
| 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| defunct and has been replaced by something which is not named.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.
As I said, to each his own, but I hate those keys, even in
Windows. Can't count the times in a game I was trying to hit the Alt
key and hit the Win key instead only to be popped back to desktop. As
I said, I pryed those suckers completely off!
In addition, under Linux I redefined my Alt keys, via xkeycaps, to be
my Meta key for XEmacs too.
Good Luck,
Gary
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