I have placed a couple of pictures of apple azerty keyboard online [1],
to help those who may never have seen such keyboards. I also found a
picture online of what I take to be a german keyboard [2].
As you can see there are two symbols on the "alt" key. I take the
symbol below "alt" to be the symbol for the compose character key. I am
not sure how this maps to xkeycaps. But it certainly seems to be
different to what "alt" is used for in windows, which usually has a
special key for character composition to called alt-gr to the left of
the white space.
As I can remember unix allows you to set (using xkeycaps for example)
control, alt, meta and hyper keys. It also allows one to distinguish
between right and left versions of these keys.
It would be really handy to have a document explaining the mapping of
these control, alt, meta and hyper keys to their windows and apple
equivalents with explanations of their usual intended purpose for each
purpose. Something like this would be sorely needed to help people
write cross platform shortcuts.
I am myself already starting to get a better feel for the problem.
On Sep 29, 2004, at 11:54 AM, Emile Schwarz wrote:
I read once more Henry’s message (just before hitting the reply
button) and definitely, he is right, but his description apply to a
Windows machine. Using Alt (instead of Option) make me feels that.
Running Windows XP, the user press Alt were the Macintosh user press
Command. Here is the lying :(.
I may be wrong, but when the software runs under Mac OS, the keyboard
shortcuts must use Command instead of Alt (Mac OS says Option where
Windows says Alt).
Actually, Control under windows is more equivalent to Command (aka
Meta) in OSX, that is, as an accelerator key modifier. Java will
handle this under the covers for you if you use
Toolkit.getMenuShortcutKeyMask().
Alt in Java is used as a focus accelerator (meaning the alt-KEY
combination moves focus somewhere) regardless of platform (native w32
apps sometime use this, most OSX apps don't).
which I suppose explains why Netbeans uses Alt-o for the "open source"
command which should move me to another window...
In general, Alt under w32 is used for keyboard traversal rather than
for accelerator keys, although there's nothing to stop it from being
used as one.
I am not sure what keyboard traversal is.
X11-based systems (linux, un*x) used to use Alt as an accelerator, but
most UIs now seem to follow w32 usage.
On 29 Sep 2004, Tim Boudreau wrote:
Perhaps for a future release it would be possible to provide alternate
bindings so Alt is simply never used for binding actions; however
doing that presents a couple of problems: 1. The alternate
keybindings would need to be documented (as in, docs writers will
strenuously object),
true, but there may just be no way around this.
and 2. There simply may not be enough keys to go around, sans one
modifier key - at least not while producing vaguely intuitive
shortcuts.
Others seem to suggest there are enough. Look forward to your response
:-)
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Java-dev mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/java-dev/email@hidden
