On Sep 6, 2011, at 10:42 AM, Michael Natterer wrote: > On Tue, 2011-09-06 at 12:58 -0400, Paul Davis wrote: >> On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 12:49 PM, Michael Natterer <mi...@gimp.org> wrote: >>> On Tue, 2011-09-06 at 08:27 -0700, John Ralls wrote: >> >> [ ... imminent turf war ... ] >> >> this seems to be about two different things, neither of which are in >> conflict (and i think john actually agrees with this). >> >> 1) whether or not the Alt key should generate MOD1 as a modifier >> 2) whether or not code that wants to be cross-platform can assume that >> they can use MOD1 with its own chosen semantics >> >> the problem is that (2) includes GTK, not just applications, and GTK >> already makes this assumption. as a result, john changed the modifier >> that alt/option generates on OS X, because (2) is not true for OS X. >> >> if (2) was fixed so that GTK was not an example of code that assumes >> that MOD1 is free for any interpretation on any platform, then (1) is >> moot, and it really doesn't matter what the Alt key generates on OS X >> (hence, it could be MOD1). >> >> but as long as (2) remains an issue within GTK itself, its hard to >> argue that a key that has clearly different purposes for a large body >> of platform users of OS X should be handled by GTK as if it had some >> different meaning based on another platform. > > That's not what I'm asking for. The only special meaning of "Alt" > in GTK is to invoke mnemonics. Other than that, it's simply a modifier. > Same on the Mac, it's just a modifier. Let's just disable the mnemonics > on the Mac then. > > The fact that the OS uses it to generate special characters is > not really relevant here. One X11 window manager "steals" key > combo A from the app, the other one key combo B, there is nothing > I can do about this. > > Turning "Alt" into "Alt" fixes more than it breaks. It fixes e.g. > configuring GTK keybindings (you can easily make Alt-cursor do > word navigation then, the config file says alt, it's all correctly > mapped, the modifier says alt, and it just works). > > And it's not just key bindings. Alt-click should be alt-click, > there is nothing wrong about that. If the OS decides to use it > for its own purposes, then it's the job of higher-level code > to be aware of that. > > If we need to change something in GTK as a consequence of that > change, then so be it, but please let's not do strange stuff > to the quartz' backend's modifier mapping just to accommodate > some code in GTK that was never meant to handle the Mac, but > can easily be changed to simply do it.
It's not really different. Getting rid of the hard-coded association between <alt> in an accelerator map or key binding and GDK_MOD1_MASK is part of Paul's (2). I'd map it to GDK_META_MASK, but I'm open to super, hyper, or a new GDK_ALT_MASK (bit 25, perhaps). It *is* the right thing to do, I think, but it's not a quartz-only change and it probably would not be welcome in gtk+-2.24. This doesn't have anything to do with being able to map option-d to an accelerator map item <alt>d and have it work. It won't. (At present in master <alt>d will map to command-d, which works fine and presents only a documentation problem to the app developer.) Regards, John Ralls _______________________________________________ gtk-devel-list mailing list gtk-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list