Re: Suggestion for terminal package maintainers

[Ken Brown <kbrown at cornell dot edu>]

On 6/3/2009 8:53 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Jun  3 08:03, Ken Brown wrote:
> > 1. Control-<space> appears to generate <space> in the cygwin console.
>
> Right.  That's because the space key does not return any other character
> then 0x20 in the Windows console, regardless of the modifier keys you're
> pressing.  Same goes for Alt-Space which should ideally return Esc-Space
> or \240.  Maybe we should really add that while we're at it.

From my emacs-centric view of things, I think you should.  Both 
Alt-Space and Control-Space are used a lot in emacs, especially 
Control-Space.

> > 2. Control-Alt-<any key> does not appear to generate anything (or maybe  
> > it generates NUL).
>
> That's a longstanding problem which probably can't be fixed satisfingly.
> On non-English keyboards, the right Alt key is called AltGr and returns
> the modifiers Left-Control/Right-Alt.  It's used to enter certain
> characters which are not accessible using the normla keys with just the
> shift modifier.  For instance, on a german keyboard, the keys [/{ and
> ]/} are replaced with Umlaut-u and +/* keys.  To enter the square and
> curly braces, one has to type AltGr-7 up to AltGr-0.  The problem is,
> you can't distinguish between pressing Ctrl+Alt and pressing AltGr on
> these keyboards (or rather, in these keyboard settings).

What do linux and xterm do?  Ctrl+Alt is a commonly-used key combination 
in emacs, so it would be surprising if they didn't work on a non-English 
keyboard.  But I've never had occasion to try it, and I don't have 
access to a non-English keyboard right now.  Maybe Andy knows the 
answer.  In mintty, can you distinguish between Ctrl+Alt and AltGr on a 
non-English keyboard?

Ken