typing characters not present on your keyboard (was Re: OT What does RET (Enter) do and how does it do it ??)

[Andras Simon]

On 8/26/07, Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at panet.co.yu> wrote:
>
> X has a very complicated while simultaneously very limited (ie. stupid)
> keyboard controls. It does not make the difference between left ctrl and
> right ctrl, for example (if the keyboard happens to have both). Same for
> shift keys. While it is enough for a typical mouse-oriented user, it fails
> to
> support anything more advanced in terms of keyboard.

Are you sure about the L/R Ctrl part?

$ xmodmap -pm
xmodmap:  up to 3 keys per modifier, (keycodes in parentheses):

shift       Shift_L (0x32),  Shift_R (0x3e)
lock        Caps_Lock (0x42)
control     Control_L (0x25),  Control_R (0x6d)
mod1        Alt_L (0x40),  Alt_L (0x7d),  Meta_L (0x9c)
mod2        Num_Lock (0x4d)
mod3
mod4        Super_L (0x7f),  Hyper_L (0x80)
mod5        Mode_switch (0x5d)

In xev also, the two Ctrl keys show up as different keypresses.

So you can, say, switch off Ctrl_R with

xmodmap -e "clear control"
xmodmap -e "add control = Control_L"

Andras