Comment 13 for bug 167290

Release 0.46 nor latest svn (20898) still does not work in my OSX Tiger nor Leopard English USA setups. I have tried the xmodmap tricks which work if you run xmodmap after starting X11.app but does not work with the Inkscape.app launching X11.app.

In testing, the pressing of Alt does indeed result in GDK_Alt_L and GDK_Alt_R key press events, but then subsequent keys do not get their rightful GDK_MOD1_MASK bit set. (Even more perverse, the mouse motion and mouse button press messages DO get the right GDK_MOD1_MASK bit set.)

Someone else added an undocumented preference (post-0.46) called "options/mapalt/value" that tries to adjust the alt key mapping, but even this does not solve the problem. I think this was intended to allow the Command key to act as an Alt key.

I have made a private patch to the main.cpp snooper() routine which supports a different undocumented preference called "options/trackalt/value" that tries to monitor the pressing and releasing of the Alt key itself, and then asserting the GDK_MOD1_MASK bit into any subsequent keyboard input. This seems to work for me (Alt+F pops file menu, Alt+B makes bitmap copies, Alt+D clones, all kerning works, etc.), but I think it needs a lot more testing with other OSX and Linux users, especially non-English users, before I go too much farther with committing it.

(As for JiHO's astute observation that you can't type Alt+ABCDEEF and get the special characters å∫ç∂éƒ, I think this is more of a bug with X11.app, not Inkscape in particular. You also can't enter Cyrillic or Chinese or Japanese text with the system-wide International input method, like you could with most native OSX applications.)