Sorry if this appears twice, due to my own logs it was sent but till now it did not appear, so I guess it might have been lost.
[26.02.02 21:27 +0100] Radovan Garabik <-- : > On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 07:50:39PM +0100, Ionel Mugurel Ciobica wrote: > > 26-02-2002, 20h 23'00", Erika Pacholleck scria despre "Re: Meta vs. Alt": > > They are just some general shift keys that applications can take an > advantage of. It is already too bad that X programs rely on Alt > key to be available (and not on Meta - well, that would be messing up > things with X terminal emulators, so perhaps this is justified), giving > them two more keys would be just making matters worse in the future. I am not yet that far to examine how X is doing it all and what happens in X with a self defined keytable. My normal de-latin is totally anti- ergonomic, pressing a modifier and a normal key with the same hand ... > > > But what is Meta really doing? > > before Alt, there was Meta... Hehe, wasn't that one beginning: Once upon a time long before Alt, ... So when the first keyboards were made we really had a key which had printed Meta on it, and later people thought Meta is not understandable, so we print Alt on the key (so to say, this is a key which will assign totally alternate/different meaning to the second key which I press with it), correct? > or, Meta was rather common key on keyboards RMS worked with, > so it is absolutely necessary for working with EMACS :-) And in the keytable maybe the first meta keycode xx = was also changed into alt keycode xx = but only the key symbols still had Meta_whatever; And those Meta_whatever had to stay as they were, because all that software which was already there, was not changed and would not understand if it suddenly were Alt_whatever. Correct? > Control, to give keys control functions. We all know what it does. send the control character which is defined for that character, like the control character for bell (short BEL) is typing [ctrl]+[b], which is in short notatation ^B; and it gives the same result as giving this order directly with the hex value for the control character with an ` echo -e \\x07 ` > Meta, to give keys some other extended functions ... > > On my systems with no configuration at all the Meta key is adding the > > eight bit to the ascii table. > > which is wrong since that messes up matters when you go beyond ASCII > world. > Meta should prefix the character with ESC. If Meta prefixes a character with ESC this would mean that for example ESC ( K would be equal to Meta_parenright K and if I have a line alt keycode 9 = Meta_parenright (Meta_ = ESC prefix in front of) then typing [Alt]+[(] [k] should do G0 to userdefined ? And alt_is_meta would then mean, if you find a single line notation for the keycode expand all those alt combinations (which are valid due to the keymap line) to result in the corresponding Meta_ key symbol. And the alt in alt_is_meta referres to the key symbol Alt (so it does not matter whether this is physically on the 56 or maybe the 125 keycode. > Nice thing is that Meta can be replaced with pressing ESC > Alt, to give the keys _yet another_ control function. That's now really too high for me, if I press the [Esc] key I expect it to send ESC (0x1b ^[) which is a single action and [Alt] would be pressed alone and it does not do anything. And if I press [Alt]+[Esc] the alt part would prefix the next with escape, so it would result in ESC ESC equal to Meta_Escape -- ifff all my above understanding was correct. -- Erika Pacholleck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> for private replies unhex my last name -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
