Hi.  VNC is working perfectly for me.  In particular I appreciate the means
by which I can 'nest' my fvwm2 Window Managers.  I typically scroll around
virtual desktops by using control-arrow key sequences.  If the numlock
key is ON then these sequences are ignored by the WM of my physical
desktop session and passed through to the session I have running in my
VNC viewer.  It's brilliant!  :-)

The mailing list archive has an entry from Mark Rainford posted back
in 2004; the URL in the archive is:

  http://www.realvnc.com/pipermail/vnc-list/2004-February/043069.html

He wrote:

> Sure, two sets of hot keys would be a dusty road to nowhere nice. I'm not
> sure if management of "nested" sessions has a decent solution. Ideally the
> first WM should be configured to "pass all" to the nested WM while
> vncviewer has the focus.
>
> One trick often mentioned is to push NumLock: then your hotkeys fly
> past the first WM and land on the nested WM. This is because (normally)
> your hotkey bindings do not include the NumLock modifier - so Atl+Tab
> looks like Alt+Tab+NumLock and is not noticed as "hot" by the immediate
> WM. By the time the key combination reaches clients of the nested Xvnc
> session, the NumLock has been stripped, so the nested WM acts on Alt+Tab.

I'm delighted by this feature, even though I think I found it by accident;
despite Mark's saying that the trick is 'often mentioned' I don't think it was
too easily found when I was looking.  Associated with that I'd like to know
why the numlock trick works ... is this something that was deliberately done
by the VNC developers?  I'm unfortunately ignorant of how X11 works; does
the X server pass the key sequence to the primary WM, which ignores it -
because it doesn't have a binding for numlock+<the rest> - and then it (the
WM) passes it on?  Does the WM strip off the numlock, or does vncviewer
remove it when it receives the event?  Is this something I can find documented
in Xorg manuals or is it a VNC eccentricity?

It works great for me, I'm just curious!  If there's any documentation or
standards out there regarding this 'trick often mentioned' I'd appreciate
references!

Oh, one quick secondary question; this 'numlock pass-through' doesn't
work if I'm running vncviewer with the -FullScreen option.  Which isn't a
problem, as I was able to do a workaround; use fvwm2's 'Style' declarations
to have a full-size viewer stripped of its WM decorations while still enjoying
the numlock-passthrough functionality.  My novice question - does vncviewer
'totally grab' the keyboard - have first look at events - when it's running
with -FullScreen?

Thanks,


Brad
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