[Alexander Skwar <ASkwar@DigitalProjects.com>] [Cooker] Setting alt to meta?

Chmouel> can someone tell me what i can answer here !!! AS> I've installed sawfish-0.34-3mdk and XFree86-4.0.2-1mdk on a AS> cooker installation. Before I used a pre-7.2 cooker. After I AS> installed everything, the left ALT key is mapped to ALT. For AS> XEmacs I need a META key. How can I redefine ALT so, that it AS> acts like META? AS> Alexander Skwar This is a historical problem with X on the Intel platform, where X implementations have typically mapped the Alt key to the Meta keysym for ease of transition. More recently designed applications tend to expect the Alt key to produce Alt. XEmacs, as a multiplatform application, chose to support _either_ an Alt key _or_ a Meta key, preferring the Meta key if both are available. Mandrake effectively chose to standardize on the opposite. We can't support Mandrake, unfortunately, without changes we don't have time to make at the moment. (The big problem is that we plan to allow use of both modifier keys when available, so that menu accelerators need not interfere with traditional Emacs Meta commands.) The ease of solution depends on whether you need yet another modifier for other applications, or whether you are happy with only the Alt key. (If you don't need a second modifier, the "map Windows key to Super" is unnecessary, as is the remapping of the other app's keymap.) hope): *** I want XEmacs to use the Alt key, not the XXX key, for Meta commands For historical reasons, XEmacs looks for a Meta key, then an Alt key. It binds Meta commands to the X11 modifier bit attached to the first of these it finds. On PCs, the Windows key is often assigned the Meta bit, but many desktop environments go to great lengths to get all apps to use the Alt key, and reserve the Windows key to (sensibly enough) the window manager. One correct way to implement this was suggested on comp.emacs.xemacs (by Kilian Foth and in more detail by Michael Piotrowski): unmap the Meta modifier using xmodmap or xkb, and then map the Meta/Windows key to the Super or Hyper keysym and an appropriate mod bit. XEmacs will not find the Meta keysym, and default to using the Alt key for Meta keybindings. Typically few applications use the (X11) Meta modifier; it is tedious but not too much so to teach the ones you need to use Super instead of Meta. There may be further useful hints in the discussion of keymapping on non-Linux platforms. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."