Celestial Software

Strange behavoiur that I have noticed for some time and it is now starting to annoy me.
Typing "@" and "$" on a Swedish keyboard requires me to press "Alt Gr" + "2" for "@" and "Alt Gr" + "4" for "$". This causes AT connected to a RedHat 8 system (xterm emulation) to send "@@" and "$$$$" to the host. This makes it *very* boring to write Perl-programs with a lot of "$".... :-)
I have not seen this when connected to a Solaris system with xterm emu and *some* other RedHat 8 systems...

Anyone seen this or is my config broken somewhere?

[ July 09, 2003, 09:42 AM: Message edited by: Brian T. Pence ]

Check the value of the LANG variable on the systems that do this vs. the ones that do not do it. See if modifying the variable (and exporting it) help.

If the LANG has a ".utf8" at the end, this could likely be the case, as this is the default now for RedHat 8.

Mattias, any word on this?

Hi Brian,
I have looked at both the systems' environment variables and they are practically the same, the high-lights are:
BASH=/bin/bash
BASH_ENV=/root/.bashrc
BASH_VERSINFO=([0]="2" [1]="05b" [2]="0" [3]="1" [4]="release" [5]="i686-pc-linux-gnu")
BASH_VERSION='2.05b.0(1)-release'
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
SUPPORTED=en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en
TERM=xterm

However, I think I found the culprit for this - if I turn off the "Use Alt as Emacs META key" option in the preferences, which differed in the configuration everything is 100% OK on both systems. So question is if the "Alt" (left hand of the spacebar) and the "Alt Gr" (right hand side of spacebar) are different?!? I am only able to use "Alt Gr" for @ and $ and only "Alt" as META in Emacs....

Thanks,
/msa

So, you're saying that the "use alt as emacs meta" option affects both alt keys (left and right) and adversely affects the alt-gr (right-alt) functions of your Swedish keyboard?? Perhaps If I make the emacs-alt key only affect the left alt key, then we'll avoid messing up the alt-gr.

Personally, I can't get altgr-2 or altgr-4 to do anything, even with Swedish keyboard installed, so I'll have to get you to test it.

Might be nice to have a 'use windows meta key as emacs meta' option as well. (on my todo list)

Might be nice to have a 'use windows meta key as emacs meta' option as well. (on my todo list) As long as the "Alt" (left) key will be possible to use as META as well that's fine with me. I'll be happy to help you test stuff if there are more things involving keyboard layouts creeping up.

/msa

Mattias,

I posted a new beta (RC27) that restricts the Emacs-Meta key to the left alt, therefore freeing up the right alt key for the alt-gr function. If I add a Windows-Meta=EmacsMeta, it will only be in addition to the current functionality, not replacing it.

Also, in my research about the behavior of the altgr key, I began to notice that there were other characters that you still could not type, including the Euro symbol. Turns out, when the keyboard is producing Unicode characters, they are often getting truncated. So, I posted another Beta (RC28) that converts the characters coming from the keyboard using the currently select character translation. Now, you can type a Euro (altgr-5 or altgr-e) when you are using a character set that supports it (iso-8859-15 or UTF-8)

If I add a Windows-Meta=EmacsMeta, it will only be in addition to the current functionality, not replacing it. Phew, glad to hear!

RC28 is working fine here in all respects.
/msa

BTW: The "Alt Gr"-E now gives me the Euro "€" sign, previously I got the C-cedille character.

[ July 11, 2003, 06:42 AM: Message edited by: Mattias Sandstrom ]