Re: ALT as a click modifier

[Wolfgang Lux]

Riccardo Mottola wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I got soo many suggestions, that I am confused ;)

okay, I'm going to stick my head out, though I guess I'm not that much 
qualified to answer for I'm using only Apple keyboards for a long time.

> Riccardo
> 
> Riccardo Mottola wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> after William's advice, I changed Graphos mouse-event key-modifier for 
>> certain operations to Alternate, to be more similar to other applications.
>> 
>> Graphos handles three different modifiers: shift, control, alt (method 
>> below).
>> 
>> Originally "alt" was mapped to NSCommandKeyMask. This would usually work 
>> fine on GNUstep with the standard setup, but on Mac you needed "command", as 
>> it is obvious. Now I set it to Alternate and it works like a charm on Mac, 
>> but not on GNUstep: there is no key combination that returns Alt.
>> I fear this is a similar problem as the one with alt as key-modifier for 
>> Emacs that Fred had.
>> 
>> I tried to remap keys using SystemPreferences, so that "command" becomes the 
>> WindowKey, thus I could map Alternate to Meta. That way, it works on GNUstep 
>> too, essentially it behaves like on Mac. However, The windows key is not 
>> always available, people usually run with the standard setup.

So, how many keyboards are out there without a Windows or other extra key? PC 
keyboards come along with a Windows key for quite sometime now.

>> What options do I have?
>> 
>> 1) #ifdef in the code for GNUstep and Mac. Horrible, but quick and works
>> 2) Introduce preferences in graphos where the behaviour is customizable. 
>> This would be an advanced version of 1)
>> 3) interpret both Command and Alternate as altClick. Looks dirty to me and 
>> probably would not work if on GS command gets mapped to control
>> 4) change GS's gehaviour to issue "alt" if alt gets clicked and in case 
>> command is alt, both alt and command are returned as modifier (is this even 
>> possible?)
>> 5) ...? what other option

OpenStep used to map the Alt key to Command and AltGr to the Alt key on 
traditional PC keyboards (without a Windows key). This should work for GNUstep, 
too. So I think the 5th option, which you should choose, would be doing nothing 
at all. Except possibly checking whether the default mapping for our modifier 
keys is reasonable.

Wolfgang