On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 18:02:18 +1000, "Benjamin Herrenschmidt" said: > On Tue, 2004-10-26 at 10:12 +0200, Sven Luther wrote: > > > I never fuly understood why you needed to rebuild the xkb module though, nor > > do i really know what should be the right way for it to work in the first > > place, never having used a pmac before. > > I didn't rebuild anything ... > > One thing I have in my hacked keymap is defining Alt as Mode_switch to > get the special combos using Alt, like Alt-shift-L for | or Alt-N for ~ > (dead key) etc... > > I think it should be possible to tell xkb to just do those combos with > Alt- without actually defining Alt as Mode_switch or whatever else...
Well it could be, but it would be very strange, I think. Both Mode_switch and ISO_Level3_Shift are like the regular Shift keys. If you wanted an Altkey and F to be the "alt modifier" + F to open the File menu, but you want an Altkey and N to be Mode_switch + N and generate a deadtilde symbol, it would probably be possible, but you would have to make substantial changes to the types/ files that would depend heavily on the symbols files. I think there are two problems here. One is that the traditional xlib/xmodmap keymaps and the XKB maps use groups and levels a little bit differently (if you are using xmodmap to change third- or fourth-level symbols, you're probably confusing XKB). The other is the historical difference between the Alt_L/Alt_R and Meta_L/Meta_R symbols. Some people expect the PC's Altkeys to generate Alt_L/_R and others expect Meta_L/_R. And add to this that Mac OS users expect the Altkeys to behave like Mode_switch or ISO_Level3_Shift to get third symbols, and Windows users expect things like Altkey+Tabkey to cycle through windows and it's a total mess. > Looking at the way the Darwin driver works, it just fills the X keymap > tables internally with proper translations based on the sets of > modifiers, whatever those modifiers are. > > It's just a matter of understanding XKB syntax, which is beyond my > abilities :) The XKB syntax isn't that bad, but there are a lot of applications (including all GTK+ apps, I think) that mix XKB usage and xlib/xmodmap. There is an XKB keymap project (http://freedesktop.org/Software/XKeyboardConfig) with freedesktop.org that's trying to make sense of this, but different users have very different expectations, so it's hard. Frank -- Frank Murphy [EMAIL PROTECTED]
