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

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

On Thu, Jul 11, 2002 at 01:55:16PM -0700, Sri Ramkrishna wrote:
> > My laptop does not have windows keys at all. Neither does it have Menu
> > or Hyper or whatever. I think we should stay with the common "Ctrl/Alt"
> > land here. It is of course okay to use other ones too if such keys
> > exist. But everything should work with a basic keyboard.
> 
> Absolutely, I have a legacy keyboard that does not have the windows keys.
> Being able to remap the keys to additional function should be something
> easy to do.  But the default should expect only the basic keyboard layout.
> 
> sri


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 got the impression people thought I was pro-Meta-for-WMs because I happen
 to have a Meta key.)

The CUA keybindings are here:

  http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/F29AL000/2.2.117?SHELF=CEESL002&DT=19921204095534

and here:

  http://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/cgi-bin/bookmgr_OS390/BOOKS/F29AL000/2.2.54?SHELF=CEESL002&DT=19921204095534

Windows (a derivate of CUA) here:
  http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnwue/html/appxB.asp?frame=true

You may note that the Windows Windows key (heh heh) is only a duplicate of
some other keys, Start Menu items, or taskbar items.


BTW, sugar-coating, cheese puffs, scrambled eggs, the oven key, ...

 ... maybe instead of calling things crack, people should call them ...

   ... um ... vegemite?

/me runs,
Greg Merchan