Erika Pacholleck wrote on 2002-02-26 19:23 UTC: > But what is Meta really doing? > And now there are even more unknown keys Super and Hyper, are those > my left and right Tux-keys? ;))
When X11 was originally designed, MIT had bought a couple of then very fashionable "Symbolics LISP machines", which had level 2, 3, 4 shift keys called meta, super, hyper. That's where these key names come from. Richard Stallman also had one of these, hence the use of a "Meta" key in Emacs (with an ESC fallback for VT100 terminals). All this is horribly obsolete today, because Symbolics LISP machines do not exist any more and practically every X11 user uses the standard PC keyboard with keys labelled Alt, AltGr, Compose, etc. The X11 meta key nomenclatura urgently needs a little facelift, IMHO, but since the entire original X11 project team has left the X Consortium (now called X.Org with all new people), the maintenance of the X11 standards has stalled. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
