On Nov 21, 2007, at 1:13 PM, Robert Tillyard wrote:
On 21 Nov 2007, at 07:03, Martin Costabel wrote:
Mick Mueck wrote:
I was the (ir)responsible person for this change - while beta
testing Leopard I noticed both Alt keys were mapped to
Mode_Switch. I checked several other unix/Linux keyboards and
those keys consistently came up as Alt_L & Alt_R so I put in a
request to change them to be consistent with everything else (that
I tried).
I guess this is the core of the dispute that we are are having:
What do we want the keys in X11 to be consistent with? One wish is
to have them consistent with non-X11 Apple apps and the other wish
is to have them consistent with non-Apple X11 programs. We cannot
have both.
As an occasional X11 user (nowadays; I used to use it much more
regularly) I am in the first camp: If I have to type Alt-s to get a
certain letter in TextEdit or in TeXshop or Carbon Emacs, then I
want Alt-s to produce this same letter also in nedit or xemacs. And
this means Alt->Mode_switch.
This first wish is one that can be fulfilled, because the keyboard
is, after all, the same whether used with X11 or not.
OTOH, the second wish of being consistent with X11 programs on
other machines can only very incompletely be satisfied, because
those other machines usually have a lot more keys then Apple
keyboards.
Is it not possible to make these choices part of the X11 Preferences?
Yes and no.
First, we have to specifically define "these choices" in a way that is
clear and coherent.
Next, Apple tries to avoid adding extra user-visible configuration
options, when possible, in favor of trying to guess the right thing to
do. This is not a subject for debate; it's just the way things are.
So, the more options we add to an open-source version of X11.app, the
more different it will be from the one that Apple ships.
Historically, this was the major user-visible difference between
X11.app and XDarwin -- XDarwin had a bazillion configuration options
in its preference panes. Some people liked it, some didn't, but
nobody had to use it.
If we want to go down that route with X11.app (now that the two have
been merged into one), our best bet would be to make an "Advanced" tab
of the preference panel -- this tab would probably not appear at all
in the "Official" Apple version (although we could probably make it so
that the same options could be set from the command line using the
'defaults' command.).
--
Ben Byer
CoreOS / BSD Technology Group, XDarwin maintainer
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