Ever since I moved from MS-DOS to FreeDOS years ago, I have been annoyed by some R-Alt key behavior. (This is on a US ANSI-layout keyboard.)
The classic illustration was in Edit, where I couldn't R-Alt+X to exit. But my touch-typing technique for a L-Alt+X would be left index finger on L-Alt, plus left ring finger on X. Nearly impossible!! Other key combinations were awkward at best. And as I noted in another post recently, the mouse pointer in Edit is nearly invisible on the machine I'm currently working with, so mouse-instead-of-keyboard wasn't a decent solution either. But after another dive into this issue, I now notice this: - Even in Edit, R-Alt acts like L-Alt with no document open. - In SetEdit, R-Alt acts like L-Alt. - In FreeDOS Help, R-Alt acts like L-Alt. - In DOOM, R-Alt acts like L-Alt. I'm now thinking that in DOS, the kernel's keyboard input method probably consists of rather simply reading the BIOS keyboard buffer, and absent the intervention of a running DOS keyboard driver, it is probably up to each program to decide how to process key combinations. If that's the case, then it's probably just FreeDOS Edit (and perhaps a few other programs) that will annoy me this way. Can anyone confirm or deny this understanding? [By the way, I also looked at running KEYB with a customized US.KEY layout, but it looks like US.KEY only customizes a handful of keys and key combinations, leaving the rest to whatever the default keyboard handling is. To make R-Alt act like L-Alt across the board, I would have to create MANY lines in the k858 look-up table, specifying what happens for R-Alt+A, R-Alt+B, R-Alt+C, etc. And it might be that program handling of key combinations could still override that -- I don't know.] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
