Comment 13 for bug 775434

KSM

As someone who has just changed from Mac OS X to Ubuntu I want to add two or three words to this issue. First of all Mac OS X gets it right in a lot of places and each modifier key has its own "domain":
- ctrl: Controls the cursor movements in text fields (ctrl-a: beginning of line, ctrl-e end of line, etc.)
- alt: Alternative Option: this sometimes gives access to alternative commands especially in menus by mouse or shortcut.
- cmd: Command via keyboard. This key is bigger than the others and it should be used for the Meta key in Emacs on OS X)

left and right alt and ctrl are the same just like shift one the left and the right is the same (except for Games, of course, because often they need to keep the physical / spatial layout constant across several keyboard layout for different languages.

Now I do not expect Ubuntu (Unity, Dash, Metacity and my favourite applications) to work exactly they same - but they do work the same as their BSD based counterpart when it comes to predefining a lot of desktop and window handling shortcuts. This is where Mac OS X gets it wrong: its dashboard has its own key and /show all windows/ (like super-w in Ubuntu which works great except for drag&drop operations) has its own key but then there are dozens of other predefined modifier-key combinations that I as a user suddenly can't use in my favourite application.

With Linux based systems like Ubuntu we suddenly see a lot of layers when it comes to keyboard events: keyboard, kernel, windowing system with window system core and window manager, toolkit, application
Each and every of these layers probably does its job very well but the same keyboard shortcut does not always produce the same results for me (This might be related to another bug report where Metacity does something with the keyboard shortcuts in lists). Especially but not only when working with working horses like Blender (just a guess) and Emacs (really bad experience here) it becomes annoying to see desktop features shadow application features. You can call that Keyboard Shortcut Madness or KSM

Now I know about xmodmap but when I checked last time (in a Virtual Machine) the Dash on the left side of the screen didn't even care about it which means this: it behaves like a game and seems to listen on raw keycodes which can't be remapped by xmodmap. That is a no no for something that should allow the user to get the job done: imagine your favourite cart race game can only be won when you put the breaks on cmd or alt?

Apart from to many keyboard shortcuts of my compiz based desktop game (yes it's really flashy) there is that other annoying issue where left and right alt behave differently. This might be an heritage from the original PC keyboard but this makes me a two finger typer who presses the modifier and shortcut key on the same side of the keyboard: in Emacs I have to Meta-X (which you need all of the time to "run" a command by name) with my left thumb on left alt and my middle finger on X. I knew how to play the guitar so my left hand is used to these spider exercises but when I want to enter "@" it's the same on the other side because. You do deliver keyboard maps for italian, english and german and for the Mac. But they don't work on my Mac.

Now let's go on to mouse events: my trackpad on Ubuntu somehow makes it to translate the multitouch click correctly as a right click but Dash reacts on button-down where all over the place the right click context menus appear and vanish alread on button-down ... but the original bug report was about keyboard events, right?

Please leave the keyboard shortcuts to the applications and use a sane mapping for the modifier keys where left alt and right alt (even with "gr"aphical) is just alt and left super and right super is just super. And please let me remap Super-W to the special non-fn-function key which has that nice /show all windows/ icon "engraved" on it.

Thank you!