Carbon: Unicode keyboard layouts does not work properly

[David Reitter]

Bug report from Christian Lynbech  (christian #\@ defun #\. dk),  
pertaining to current Carbon Emacsen:


I have been tracking a really annoying problem relating to keyboard
layouts and the meta key.

There appears to be a problem in relation to unicode keymaps, but only
when they deviate from the american layout. In the following I have
used the standard danish (latin) layout and the extended norwegian
(unicode) layout, both part of the default set of layouts. To the best
of my knowledge, the problem does not as such follow the specific
layouts but only whether its latin or unicode (and different from the
US layout).

In the scandinavian keyboard layouts, the characters on top of the
numerical keys deviates slightly wrt. to the american layout. In
particular, on danish (and norwegian) keyboards, the symbol on top of
'8' is a "(" while on the US keyboard it is a "*".

The symptom I am experiencing is that trying to invoke the emacs
command of `insert-parentheses´ I want to press Meta+Shift+8. When
using the danish latin keyboard layout, I get what I want (ie. "M-(")
but with a unicode keyboard layout, emacs claims I am pressing "M-*"
as it would have been on an american keyboard.

In this test I used latest nightly snapshot of Aquamacs without any
.emacs and thus with Alt as meta key but there is no difference when
using the Command key as Meta.

This problem exists in several OSX-based emacs's including Aquamacs
(both 0.9.9d and snapshot), GNU Emacs 22.0.9x (both from porkrind and
aquamacs.org) and Carbon Emacs (Jan 2007 version) but NOT in EmacsApp
(from http://emacs-app.sourceforge.net/) which is based on Emacs 23,
whether or not that is the relevant difference.

Using Peter Maurers Key Codes application, I get the following
trace. The trace contains four key presses, that of Shift+8 and
that of Shift+Alt+8, first for the danish (latin) layout and then
again for the extended norwegian (unicode) layout, and sure enough the
modifier codes are slightly different depending on whether the latin
or unicode layout was used:


        Key Codes 1.0 (c) Peter Maurer 2005

        Key Down
        Characters:     (
        Unicode:                40 / 0x28
        Keys:           ⇧(
        Key Code:       28 / 0x1c
        Modifiers:      131074 / 0x20002

        Key Down
        Characters:     {
        Unicode:                123 / 0x7b
        Keys:           ⇧⌥(
        Key Code:       28 / 0x1c
        Modifiers:      655394 / 0xa0022

        Key Down
        Characters:     (
        Unicode:                40 / 0x28
        Keys:           ⇧(
        Key Code:       28 / 0x1c
        Modifiers:      131330 / 0x20102

        Key Down
        Characters:     {
        Unicode:                123 / 0x7b
        Keys:           ⇧⌥(
        Key Code:       28 / 0x1c
        Modifiers:      655650 / 0xa0122