I added some information to #259740, but I'm hopelessly confused as to what bug which bug report is describing; nothing discussed in that bug report has helped me so far.
I'm trying to use altwin:meta_win. Trying very, very hard, in fact. Not in any complicated X applications; just in xterm. This is with the -7 packages installed. To take my window manager out of the picture, I started a clean X server running nothing except for a single xterm. The xterm is running zsh. At this point I have no options set (not even altwin:meta_win); generic pc104. This should be easy to reproduce. All I want is for my Windows keys to send Meta, and xterm to treat that like Escape. This requires XTerm*metaSendsEscape: true. [For some reason, I have to start an xterm, run xrdb in it, and start a new xterm for this to take effect. I can't run it from a VT with $DISPLAY set; it just switches to the X server instead of merging resources. Huh.] This all used to work after "setxkbmap -option altwin:meta_win". Now I'm having trouble. Here's what xmodmap looks like when I start: shift Shift_L (0x32), Shift_R (0x3e) lock Caps_Lock (0x42) control Control_L (0x25), Control_R (0x6d) mod1 Alt_L (0x40), Alt_L (0x7d), Meta_L (0x9c) mod2 Num_Lock (0x4d) mod3 mod4 Super_L (0x7f), Hyper_L (0x80) mod5 Mode_switch (0x5d), ISO_Level3_Shift (0x7c) At this point alt-b generates "backwards word" and windows-b generates "b". Without metaSendsEscape alt-b generates an accented a. I turn on altwin:meta_win: shift Shift_L (0x32), Shift_R (0x3e) lock Caps_Lock (0x42) control Control_L (0x25), Control_R (0x6d) mod1 Alt_L (0x40), Alt_L (0x7d) mod2 Num_Lock (0x4d) mod3 mod4 Meta_L (0x73), Meta_R (0x74), Super_L (0x7f), Hyper_L (0x80), Meta_L (0x9c) mod5 Mode_switch (0x5d), ISO_Level3_Shift (0x7c) Now neither alt-b nor windows-b produces any effect. If I use 'xmodmap -e "clear mod1"', then alt-b generates backspace-word and windows-b generates an accented a - this is what I wanted, and used to get, I think. If I do 'xmodmap -e "add mod1 = Alt_L"', then neither windows-b nor alt-b produces any effect again. If I do 'xmodmap -e "add mod1 = Alt_R"', so that both Alt_L and Alt_R are mapped to mod1, then Alt-b generates backwards word and Windows-b generates "b". All of the above, mind you, is using the _left_ alt and windows keys. I haven't even tried the right ones, since I usually use the left when typing. So adding Alt_R to mod1 changes the behavior of both left keys... I can't reproduce all of these results in another server with GNOME and Metacity running - specifically, with mod1 cleared, Alt-b generates "b" instead of the accented "a". I assume that's either GNOME or Metacity somehow eating the modifier. Right now I don't care. It's the keyboard cursor movement that I need. This is all terribly confusing, and it's a real shame that we're going to carry it into Sarge, IMO. But most of all I'd like advice on how to make the simple case of using altwin:meta_win work in xterm. All ideas appreciated. -- Daniel Jacobowitz