Re: Key bindings proposal

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Miles Bader writes:

 > I'm a bit confused about how the alt-meta split actually happens in
 > X, because I've found it _extremely_ hard to get any kind of
 > consistent behavior (across systems, even those running the same OS
 > / version, and across apps).
 > 
 > In particular, it seems to depend on the type of keyboard you use (USB
 > vs. PS/2), and Emacs does not recognize modifier mappings that other
 > apps do, so I get the feeling Emacs may be using reading keyboard input
 > at a different level than most apps (e.g., logical vs. physical or
 > something?).

Could be.

Another possibility is simply that Emacs tries to cater to broken
keyboard configurations, and (as you might expect) sometimes that
fails.  XEmacs will run, but bitches loudly about it (a behavior
inherited from Lucid Emacs).  The story is here,

    http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/autobogotification.html

the technical details about how Meta and Alt are *defined* by X11 are
here

    http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/autobogotification-b.html