Darwin keyboard woes

[Nathaniel Gray]

On Dec 22, 2004, at 11:37 AM, Torrey Lyons wrote:
 
> At 11:50 PM -0800 12/21/04, Nathaniel Gray wrote:
>> I'm a Mac user and I use uControl (http://gnufoo.org/ucontrol) to 
>> remap the modifier keys on my keyboard so that I can do things like 
>> turn caps-lock into command and swap the option and command keys by 
>> the space bar.  Unfortunately it seems that any key that I touch with 
>> uControl just vanishes as far as X is concerned.  For example, if I 
>> turn caps-lock into command, launch X, then run xev, caps-lock 
>> produces absolutely no response.  All this stuff works fine with 
>> Apple's X11.app.  I understand that XDarwin handles the keyboard 
>> differently, but I'm not sure how to go about solving this problem. I 
>> would appreciate any suggestions that people have.
>>
>> Also, even without uControl in effect, I get no response in xev from 
>> the option/alt key on my powerbook.  This is with Xorg 6.8.2 RC1 on 
>> OS X 10.3.7, but I've seen the problem with every non-Apple X server 
>> I've tried.
>
> You should be the same behavior as X11.app if you don't use a 
> keymapping file. You can do this by deleting the keymapping file 
> listed in the the XDarwin.app preferences. You can check which kind of 
> keymapping is being used by looking at the console log during XDarwin 
> startup. Make sure it falls back to the system keymap.

Thanks!  This solves the option/alt problem but it doesn't solve the 
uControl problem.  I verified that X is falling back to the kernel 
keymap.  :-(  Any other ideas?

> (This should be more intuitive. The situation is that you have to use 
> a keymapping file on 10.1 and can use either that or the system keymap 
> on 10.2 or newer. However, on 10.3 or newer the keymapping files are 
> not installed by default. Unfortunately the Preferences UI does not 
> reflect any of this complexity. X11.app has the advantage of only 
> targeting one OS version.)

It would probably work to make the label say something like "Keymapping 
file (for Jaguar and earlier):".  The best option would be to simply 
disable and/or hide that field on 10.3 and above, unless there's some 
reason Panther users might want to set a keymapping file.

Cheers,
-n8

--
 >>>-- Nathaniel Gray -- Caltech Computer Science ------>
 >>>-- Mojave Project -- http://mojave.cs.caltech.edu -->