[11137] in Athena Bugs
Re: sun4 7.6L: Capslock vs. xmodmap
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ken Olum)
Mon Oct 4 10:57:09 1993
Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1993 10:59:49 -0400
From: kdo@marie.mit.edu (Ken Olum)
To: cfields@MIT.EDU
Cc: rptaurie@MIT.EDU, bugs@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <9310012217.AA19460@sullius-secundus.MIT.EDU> (cfields@MIT.EDU)
From: cfields@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 93 18:17:03 -0400
kdo writes:
> That works, thanks. God, xmodmap is a crock.
Actually, xmodmap is fine; it is Sun's X server that is losing.
Xmodmap may be free of bugs, but it's still a horrible user-interface.
I don't know why you say the language doesn't fit.
What I mean is this: Xmodmap reports and allows you to manipulate
what is calls the list of keysyms assigned to a modifier. But the
modifiers don't work by keysyms but by actual keys. Thus if you say
"keycode 126 = Foo", "add mod1 = Foo", "keycode 126 = Bar", then
"xmodmap -pm" will tell you that Bar is assigned to the mod1 modifier,
even though you said you were assigning Foo. I think the X server
model in which the keys rather than the keysyms are on the modifiers
is the right one, but xmodmap should agree with it.
I think the underlying problem is that there are no names for the
actual keys that appear on the keyboard. If every workstation/server
configuration had names for the keys (preferably corresponding to what
is written on top) then xmodmap could use these names everywhere
instead of using keysyms to refer to the keys that happen to be bound
to them.
Ken
