1. Tilde sign
-------------
Tilde sign (~) should be a normal (not a blind) key.
In Windows I hit AltGr+"+" to get ~, in XWin I need to type AltGr+"+" then space
to
get a ~.
See attachment for the initial XWin xmodmap -pke table.
Possible xmodmap correction (works fine):
keycode 35 = plus asterisk plus asterisk asciitilde
This is a can of worms I don't want to open :-)
In case it wasn't clear, the can of worms here is ensuring that XWin selects a
keyboard layout which matches the Windows one in all cases.
At the moment, in the 'de' layout, the tilde deadkey will add a macron
diacritic, e.g. AltGr + "+" + a = ã.
Obviously I meant to write 'tilde diacritic' here :-)
I really lack the expertise to determine if this is a bug in xkeyboard-config
(if this german keyboard behavior is something no german keyboard user would
ever expect or want)
The xkb configurations we use come from the xkeyboard-config project, and
aren't trying to be identical to Windows, but to conform to the appropriate
national standards and user expectations.
However, I can see in the case of XWin this is problematic, as it will be
confusing to switch between X and normal Windows windows which have different
keyboard behavior.
I did some research: German computer keyboard layout is defined in DIN 2137-2.
And to my surprise I found, that tilde is a dead key there.
That means, that the xkeyboard-config project perfectly matches the DIN norm,
while Windows (where the key is not dead) does not match it.
So I understand, that you may want to stick to the DIN norm.
Usability comes before standards compliance :-)
A workaround for guys like me, who want the XWin keyboard work the same like Windows,
is possible with xmodmap, so yeah ... let's close this point.
Doing some more research, I found an upstream bug [1], which seems to make the
opposite claim about DIN 2137-2(1998)
I also discovered that the nodeadkeys variant of the de layout was at one
stage the default used by XWin when a German Windows keyboard layout was
reported [2]
Maybe the 'correct' solution is possibly to create a 'nodeadtilde' variant of
the de layout in xkeyboard-config, and then to arrange for that to be the
default used by XWin when Windows reports a German keyboard layout.
Perhaps you'd like to try the attached patch to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/de,
which adds a nodeadtilde variant, which you can then select with -xkbvariant
nodeadtilde.
Or perhaps the correct solution is to use one of the existing deadgraveacute
or deadacute variants as the XWin default when Windows reports a German
keyboard layout?
[1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9752
[2] http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2003-05/msg00495.html