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

[Joel Becker <jlbec evilplan org>]

On Thu, Jul 11, 2002 at 11:55:59AM +0300, Tuomas Kuosmanen wrote:
> 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 a laptop with Windows keys.  They are on the top right.
I surely don't want to have to reach for them to do a basic task.  They
are hard to hit in normal work.  I'm better off using the trackpoint
mouse which doesn't require my hands to leave the home row.
	I have a bunch of PC keyboards on my regular machines.  I
explicitly avoid 104 key keyboards.  101 key keyboards are much nicer,
with a larger spacebar and an easier-to-hit Alt placement.  Again, I'd
like to be able to use accelerators.
	Yes, there should be "nice" default bindings for the Windows
keys.  The user shouldn't have to learn xmodmap or xkb.  But we should
not hose people who don't have or don't want to use the Windows keys.

Joel

-- 

"When ideas fail, words come in very handy." 
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			jlbec evilplan org