Michael (michka) Kaplan <michka at trigeminal dot com> wrote: > The use of either <CTRL> or <CTRL><SHIFT> shift states in Microsoft- > supplied keyboards is very rare. The reason it is rare is that it > interferes with programs that use those shift states to perform > control actions (such as Microsoft Word).
I agree completely that assigning characters to Ctrl+keys, Shift+Ctrl+keys, Alt+keys, and Shift+Alt+keys is a Bad Idea, for the reason you state. It's not just about conflicts with large programs like Word, either. Every Windows program with an edit control allocates at least Ctrl+X for cut, Ctrl+C for copy, and Ctrl+V for paste. It seems inconsistent for Ctrl+1, or even Shift+Ctrl+1, to be a character and not an action. I'm pretty sure I've seen at least one of Microsoft's Globaldev (Javascript) keyboards that used either Ctrl or Alt as a shifting key. I remembered thinking that such a thing was very un-Windows-like. > It is also difficult (though not impossible) to query the actual > information on these shift states due to the fact that USER will > automatically map such keystrokes to control characters (if there is > no assigned keystroke in the keyboard layout itself). -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
