On Mon, 29 May 2000, Harry Henry Gebel wrote:
> One note about using the functional Dvorak, I did have to change the
> Sawmill keybinding for "Cycle Windows" from Meta-Tab to Alt-Tab, just
> something to keep in mind, and maybe somebody who knows more about how X
> keymaps work can figure it out, I always though Meta and Alt where
> synonymous, but I guess I was wrong.
Only on keyboards that lack a full set of modifier keys. On my Sun
SPARCstation's keyboard, there's a key labeled Alt right next to the Meta
key, so they're obviously separate there. On my Intel box, things are a
bit more complicated, but I've hacked my keymap to have the left Alt be
Meta and the right Alt be Alt, so different actions can be associated with
Meta or Alt. I've also make the left winkey Super and the right winkey
Hyper, two other modifier keys that are generally missing on keyboards for
Intel boxes. And the Menu keys is of course Menu. This works well with
a lot of software. Oddly, it does not work well with KDE (one of the
reasons I prefer WindowMaker). We'll see if 2.0 improves the situation.
> But other programs like XEmacs still
> recognize the Alt key as Meta,just not Sawmill.
Okay, here's where it starts getting hairy. In addition to supporting a
full set of modifier keys (Meta, Alt, Super, and Hyper), X-Windows also
has "mod keys", mod1 - mod5, which can be associated with particular
modifier keys. I don't know how your keymap is set up, but I suspect
Meta and Alt are set up as seperate keys, but they're both associated
with "mod1". Now, a program can be setup to look for Meta, Alt, or mod1.
If it's looking for Meta or Alt, it'll only see it if you hit the
appropriate key. If it's looking for "mod1", it'll see either, since
you've associated both with "mod1". Thus, you get the confusing
behavior of some programs treating your Meta and Alt keys as if they
were identical and some programs treating them differently.
