Re: Suggestion for terminal package maintainers

[Ken Brown <kbrown at cornell dot edu>]

On 6/3/2009 10:32 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Jun  3 10:16, Ken Brown wrote:
> > On 6/3/2009 8:53 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > > On non-English keyboards, the right Alt key is called AltGr and returns
> > > the modifiers Left-Control/Right-Alt.
> > So maybe the answer is that Left-Control+Left-Alt and  
> > Right-Control+Right-Alt should each be interpreted as Control+Alt.  
> > Someone deliberately trying to enter Control+Alt+some-other-key is not  
> > likely to use different hands for Control and Alt.
>
> Wrong, imho.  If the non-modifier key is on the right side of the
> keyboard, many users tend to press left-ctrl/right-alt/non-mod-key.
> Trust me.  We had kind of the same discussion 10 or so years ago.

OK.  I'm not interested in repeating an old discussion.  But it does 
seem that the release of 1.7 is a good time to decide whether the cygwin 
console is emulating linux or xterm or something else and then make this 
happen as much as possible.

FWIW, I just tried Andy's echokeys program in xterm and in mintty.  In 
xterm the output is \x81 with all four combinations of left/right.  In 
mintty, the output is ^[^A with three of the four combinations, and 
nothing in the fourth.  The one that generates nothing is 
left-ctrl/right-alt (corresponding to AltGr).

Ken