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

[Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert ximian com>]

On Thu, 2002-07-11 at 06:27, Gregory Merchan wrote:

> I do not understand the problems other people have with Alt and Meta.
> 
> I have a laptop which has:
>   1 Ctrl key (Control_L) and 1 Alt key (Alt_L) on the bottom left.
>   1 "Windows" key (Meta_L) and 1 Menu key (Menu) on the top right 
>      - both are half-size.

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.

> I have some modifications via xmodmap and XKB, but they neither cause nor
> fix any problems. Via XKB I have rid myself of the CapsLock key and via
> xmodmap I have replaced it with Meta; I rarely use it still. Via xmodmap
> I have  changed Alt_R (which I get by pressing Fn and Alt simultaneously)
> to Multi_key; this lets me easily type things like my last name - Merchán.

Yea - shouldnt require users to reconfigure their keymaps though, that
is hard and strange business.

> The only potential conflicts I've seen are for assigning keycombos to
> workspace switching, viewport moving, and raising and lowering windows.
> Everything else works pretty much like Windows which doesn't have those
> things.

I think the current behaviour is fine. Ctrl-Alt-cursors for workspace
switching is okay, the only thing conflicting is alt-drag that I think
things like Gimp might use for something. But we got to set some
standard that apps can then take into account. The current situation
where everyone configures their own set of bindings is just a horrible
mess for application writers too. Just imagine Gimp and its gazillion
keyboard modifiers where there is always *some* crazy window manager or
person that has conflicting keybindings set up..

Tuomas

-- 
:: :: Tuomas Kuosmanen  :: Art Director, Ximian :: ::
:: :: tigert ximian com :: www.ximian.com       :: ::