Up, Down and Sideways

[Martin Baxter]

On 13/12/13 05:32, Richmond wrote:
> On 13/12/13 01:57, Warren Samples wrote:
>> On 12/12/2013 02:31 PM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
>>> And that's why we need an authoritative source.  I've never looked into
>>> it deeply enough to find which component is handling the Alt keys.  But
>>> if it's not Gnome, it may be something lower (though almost certainly
>>> not the kernel), or something higher (possible Ubuntu's keybindings
>>> interface, which I had thought were inherited from Gnome, but may be
>>> part of what they get from Debian).
>>
>>
>> These seem to be common shortcuts under Linux. I use them under KDE. I
>> like alt+drag to resize in particular, and note that the only way I
>> can grab and move the LiveCode tools palette is using alt. It may not
>> be on by default in all distros. I can turn it on and off as well as
>> change the modifier key. I have seen references in forum posts which
>> indicated that at least some KDE users who had never used these
>> shortcuts had to turn them on.
>>
>> When I change the modifier key for window resizing and moving to
>> "Meta" (option), Richmond's script runs as expected. LiveCode works as
>> stated, so long as the OS isn't hijacking the signal for its own
>> purposes further up the hierarchy.
>>
>> Conflicts in creating shortcuts are always a possibility and require a
>> little caution, and it's good to make people aware of the high
>> probability that "alt+mouseX" will be unavailable to LiveCode under
>> Linux, but I think it's not quite right to suggest it's broken.
>>
>> Warren
>>
> 
> That's a good point, but the problem I have is that I am putting a
> program together for use by Professors of Old Church Slavonic who have
> computers running Mac, Win and Linux and know nothing at all about how
> to muck about the mod. keys on their machines.
> 
> Therefore my standalone should "just work" when it ends up on some
> Prof's machine, regardless of
> what system s/he is running.  AND, the mod. keys used should be the same
> ones regardless of OS as well.
> 
> Richmond.
> 

On my (elderly) Ubuntu, variant/high bit characters are typed using
combinations of:

Alt Gr
shift

Rather than alt + shift. And that is the stock configuration. You might
perhaps be able to use the keysdown to detect these, but the returned
keycodes may vary across systems I guess.

Easier for left-handers anyway.

Might be nice for linux users if livecode could detect the state of Alt
Gr key.

On my Ubuntu, the keysdown gives me:

R Shift	65506
L Shift 65505
Alt	[nothing]
Alt Gr	65027
L Shift + Alt	65505,65511
R Shift + Alt Gr	65506,65312

I don't know if this helps you at all, but it seemed worth mentioning.

I would expect that alt + shift should work for windows and mac though,
so this issue is presumably Linux specific.

Martin