Re: National Language Support Functions

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Jason Rumney wrote:
> Lennart Borgman (gmail) wrote:
> > Indeed I do. I said you cannot follow the guidelines. I said some 
> > ways to diverge from them were worse than other ways.
> Which is worse than the other is a matter of opinion, and judging by 
> the use of the words IF, USUALLY and MUST in the snippets from the 
> accessibility guidelines I have read, your opinion differs from the 
> source you are claiming backs you up:
>
> > Keyboard shortcuts can be found in the menus of programs, or, if a 
> > letter is underlined on a menu, that usually means pressing the ALT 
> > key in combination with the underlined key has the same effect as 
> > clicking that menu item.
> > An application must not affect any system-wide shortcut keys (a key 
> > or a combination of keys used to perform a command), such as the 
> > Windows logo key that opens the *Start* menu.

I did not know that those guidelines from MS say that you must not 
steele the system-wide shortcut keys. I am not sure were I saw that 
about the Alt key, but I believe it was in the US accessibility 
guidelines. Well, I can only say Emacs have to break them in one way or 
the other.

> But what these guidelines say is not really important for considering 
> what to do in Emacs. What is important is what users want, and what we 
> can achieve technically. So far, the only patch I've seen submitted in 
> this area swallowed the Windows logo keys so that neither Emacs nor 
> Windows could see them, and there were other concerns that Eli and 
> myself had regarding the removal of the low level hook when Emacs 
> crashes, and the need to perform low level processing on many more 
> keys in order to use those keys as modifiers, that have not been 
> addressed as far as I am aware.
I agree that the important thing is what users want and what we can do. 
My patch is and has been available on my site for 1.5 yr. It is also 
included in the download when you download the patched version. (But it 
is not a separate patch.)

With this patch you can let Emacs use the Windows keys if you want, but 
you do not have to. You can let Emacs have one of them or both.

Note that other programs are not affected by this patch. I think there 
has been some misunderstandings about this before.